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Marissa Mayer is Back (bloomberg.com)

Posted by msmash on from the it's-not-over-yet dept.

Former Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is starting a technology business incubator, Lumi Labs, with longtime colleague Enrique Munoz Torres, she revealed in an interview with The New York Times. Bloomberg: The venture will focus on consumer media and artificial intelligence, according to the company's website, which is set against a backdrop of snow-covered peaks. Lumi means snow in Finnish, Mayer told the New York Times, which reported the news earlier Wednesday. The next project for Mayer, who was an early employee at Google and worked there until leaving to run Yahoo in 2012, had been a matter of considerable speculation in Silicon Valley. She left Yahoo, once a leading search engine and web destination, after it was sold to Verizon Communications last year.

3 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Re: And if you work with her this time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Imagine what Steve Jobs could have done with it.

    Marissa Mayer is an example of someone who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. When she started at Google they were a completely unknown company with 19 employees. When she left, they were the biggest name in tech. Because of that, having "14 years at Google" on your resume means you can get hired for all sorts of jobs, regardless of your lack of qualifications. (Don't forget, she was demoted shortly before leaving Google).

    However, Yahoo could have hired anyone as CEO. Steve Jobs. Me. You. It wouldn't have made a difference. Yahoo was an irrelevant walking corpse for 10+ years before Marissa Mayer got there.

  2. Re:Non-news by epine · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just because she can't put out a dumpster fire doesn't mean everything she touches is a dumpster fire.

    In more than one instance at Yahoo, she brought a water-based fire extinguisher to bear on an electrical grease fire.

    What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs — 17 December 2014

    During a breakfast with Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, Mayer asked if there might be any partnership opportunities between the magazine and Shine, Yahoo's site for women. According to Mayer's own telling of the story to top Yahoo executives, Wintour looked appalled. Shine, with its 500 million monthly page views, appealed to a mass audience, not a narrow and affluent one.

    Nevertheless, Mayer quickly became infatuated with the idea that Yahoo could attract more sophisticated consumers. She began pushing for deputies to commission high-quality shows, the way Netflix was doing with "House of Cards" and "Orange Is the New Black." One Yahoo executive was forced to explain that only a company that sold subscriptions to consumers could expect to make money off such expensive productions.

    Keep reading from that point in the article. Her legacy of dubious guidance doesn't end there.

  3. Re:Again, news? by i286NiNJA · · Score: 4, Informative

    Fiorina really pissed me off because she did horrible things to the computing community and then her career was promoted by feminist media when she would have been considered a miniature dick cheney by the same people if she wasn't a woman.

    Can you imagine why the tech industry distrusts professional activists?