Bashing her may also be naive. She may not have been hired to "save Yahoo!". She may have been hired to make a lot of money for Dan Loeb's hedge fund, and succeeded at that, if you believe the telling in this piece: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/marissa-mayer-biography-20...
Summary:
- Loeb decides he can make a bunch of money if he can invest in Yahoo!, clean out the board, and get a more compelling CEO in charge.
- Loeb buys 5% of Yahoo! (presumably at a price in the mid-teens) and starts a campaign.
- Loeb ousts then-CEO Thompson and recruits Marissa Meyer from Google to take the CEO job. She is announced in July 2012 to massive fanfare and media attention.
- Yahoo!'s stock rises to $28 or so over the next year. Seeing as how they shipped no new products of note during that time, it's fair to assume this was largely due to Meyer joining the company. In July 2013, Loeb sells off most of his holdings and is removed from the board.
Given this, it seems unfair to bash Meyer for not saving Yahoo!. She was never hired to do that. She was hired to make money for Dan Loeb and did a great job. All the handwringing about "saving Yahoo!" is a fake narrative foisted on the public by the tech press and Yahoo!'s PR people.
Once a company becomes a zombie, there's generally no saving it. If you can get enough people to believe it might happen though, you can make some money.
Also: This reading helps make sense of some of the other weirdness around Meyer's tenure. Why did Henrique De Castro get such a rich contract? Why did Meyer? Perhaps in part because some of the people negotiating those deals (Loeb and Wolf, ex president of MTV hired by Loeb to help with the Yahoo! affair) knew they'd be gone in a year and didn't care about the fallout.
Loeb's thesis was simple - that Yahoo is worth a lot more as the sum of its parts as it was a combined entity. He was right - there were long periods of time where Yahoo on its own had a negative value.
The stock price was largely driven by Alibaba - hence why attributing stock growth to Mayer's appointment was misplaced.
The idea was that you sell off the BABA holding, distribute that to investors and then you end up with Yahoo on it's own which is then pivoted to being a tech company (higher PE's) rather than a boring media company.
Mayer ended up becoming far from the ideal hedge fund CEO. She kept more of the BABA sales for acquisitions than the activists wanted, she spent hundreds of millions on silly recruiting like Henrique De Castro and then spent $2.5B+ on 50+ acquisitions - all of which didn't move the needle and ended up being written down to near-zero.
That's a lot to spend for a company that had a negative value - and Mayer hastened / worsened the situation (hence why Loeb got the hell out of there when offered $29 by Mayer)
I like your narrative and Dan Loeb should certainly send Mayer a Christmas card. Still, if indeed she was hired to make money for Dan Loeb then that does not speak any better to her managerial competence.
Summary:
- Loeb decides he can make a bunch of money if he can invest in Yahoo!, clean out the board, and get a more compelling CEO in charge.
- Loeb buys 5% of Yahoo! (presumably at a price in the mid-teens) and starts a campaign.
- Loeb ousts then-CEO Thompson and recruits Marissa Meyer from Google to take the CEO job. She is announced in July 2012 to massive fanfare and media attention.
- Yahoo!'s stock rises to $28 or so over the next year. Seeing as how they shipped no new products of note during that time, it's fair to assume this was largely due to Meyer joining the company. In July 2013, Loeb sells off most of his holdings and is removed from the board.
Given this, it seems unfair to bash Meyer for not saving Yahoo!. She was never hired to do that. She was hired to make money for Dan Loeb and did a great job. All the handwringing about "saving Yahoo!" is a fake narrative foisted on the public by the tech press and Yahoo!'s PR people.
Once a company becomes a zombie, there's generally no saving it. If you can get enough people to believe it might happen though, you can make some money.
Also: This reading helps make sense of some of the other weirdness around Meyer's tenure. Why did Henrique De Castro get such a rich contract? Why did Meyer? Perhaps in part because some of the people negotiating those deals (Loeb and Wolf, ex president of MTV hired by Loeb to help with the Yahoo! affair) knew they'd be gone in a year and didn't care about the fallout.