Marissa Mayer is Back (bloomberg.com)

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.

Comments

And if you work with her this time

[Anonymous Coward]

you are a moron.

Re: And if you work with her this time

[Luthair]

Yahoo hasn't been a successful business in 15-years.

Re: And if you work with her this time

[Anonymous Coward]

In all fairness, Yahoo was a bag of shit before Marissa Mayer got there. All she did was add some extra incompetence to finish them off.

Re: And if you work with her this time

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Again, news?

[sqorbit]

Is this really news? A tech CEO launching a start up. I know she made headlines with the disaster Yahoo was. Yahoo was pretty much a disaster before she got there and she just made it worse. If her startup does something super innovative it should be news. Someone simply launching a startup with a rather vague plan is not news, and it definitely does not matter.

Re:Again, news?

[jellomizer]

There is a reason why CEO Salary is normally inversely proportional to the success of the company.
1. Its future doesn't look great, so things like stock options arn't that great of a compensation.
2. If you are going to lead a sinking ship, you better be paid more to help compensate the fact that you were CEO of a troubled company, and we get all the negative press that we see now.

Yahoo had its problems before she started. Yahoo Business strategy was poised to go against AOL, not Google and Facebook. While they had their search engine, there was a Yahoo Community and services, and games... Mostly designed to have Yahoo to be a site that you stick to for your internet fix.
They still have some popular services. Yahoo Business is still preferred for serious business folks. And Yahoo Answers is still popular. But After AOL got kicked out and Google and Facebook had risen, It pushed Yahoo out of many of its markets.

Could Yahoo have innovated sooner. In retrospect yes. But there were and are a lot of fad competition that get some traffic but just don't hold onto it long enough. However other fads just grew and become more popular.

Back when Google came out. Its simple search engine, vs yahoo with gave you a list of popular categories to help filter down from. Has me using Yahoo for years as my default search engine, until Googles algorithm got smart enough, and they were enough people with dial-up who used google because of its small download size. At the time, yahoo will just figure speed will always get bigger so just keep a lot of content on the front page. And the Google fad will wash out when everyone is at 500kbs speed. It may have worked, but it didn't.

Re:Again, news?

[i286NiNJA]

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?

Between the lines

[jbmartin6]

focus on consumer media and artificial intelligence

I interpret this to mean they will be producing fake celebrity porn.

Re:Atificial Intelligence

[Oswald McWeany]

I guess that is the current fad now. No more Big Data.

M&M will fail because she's a shitty manager.

Makes good candy though.

Erlich Bachman

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Has Erlich Bachman met his match?

Re:And finance is coming from where?

[Opportunist]

Why prolong her misery? And ours.

Re:And finance is coming from where?

[rudy_wayne]

Hey, it's all good. If people want to keep giving her money, that's their business. I'm sure some of them will do well.

I plan on giving her money... once this crashes and burns and she's living on a sidewalk, I'll hand her a dollar so she can go get dinner from Burger King.

Sadly, that's not going to happen. When she left Google she already had more money than you'll make in your entire life. It's more likely that she'll be giving you a dollar for Burger King.

Re:Finnish affinity?

[XxtraLarGe]

Well, she's of Finnish descent, so that may be the real motivation...

Is she really a good fit for this?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I would think a successful tech business incubator would require a fair amount of flexibility. Marissa Meyer's management style, on the other hand, seems very rigid, rules-based and inflexible.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Non-news

[epine]

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.

There's always another job for terrible CEOs

[edi_guy]

Marissa isn't the exception she's the rule. Look at Jeffrey Immelt of stalwart industrial giant GE. He let that company rot from the inside out, only now are they finding out how bad he left it. But don't worry, not only he's got himself a $200 million golden parachute he has a new gig as CEO of Athenahealth. All that for being terrible at his job.

Re:But she's rich

[Ryanrule]

She got into google by working on her knees.