Wholeheartedly agree, and I think it comes down to "signalling by association". For sure she is a workaholic and that gets you far, but to me it seems like she is filling the gap of providing confirmation to insecure overachievers after she - being one herself - made mistakes and reflected on them. Mistakes that could have been avoided had you taken out the ego in the first place.
In contrast to my hypothesis: If you like her, feel free to share your thoughts or prove me wrong. What is special about her?
Marissa is one of the smartest people I have ever been around. Most of my knowledge comes from running in neighboring circles at Stanford. The (then) girl just had an amazing ability to remember things, get things, and analyze them. She also has outstanding social intelligence, and a bit of a reality distortion field.
Of course she chose the rocketship in 1999 while the rest of us fumbled around in the dot com bust. She always had the knack of picking the right place to be at the right time, and the talent (or ability to bs) that she could get noticed when she needed to.
The yahoo thing was the worst misstep I've seen her take, but she got paid $200 million to take the risk, and I'm working for peanuts. So who is the smart one?
Edited to add: There is exactly zero chance she remembers me. But everyone I hung around remembers her. She has a very strange ability to be remembered.
I've known Marissa since Stanford too, and you're wrong. I'm not sure if you're lying or what, but you're wrong.
Edit: Before you pile on, I'm rich too. Not as rich as her but rich enough not to take issue with her for that reason. The reason people remember Marissa is she was pretty. End of story.
Apparently our experiences in her orbit were pretty different.
That doesn't mean I'm lying, and I don't think you are either.
I have no idea what your experience is, and I have absolutely no reason to lie. I doubt Marissa could pick me out of a police lineup if her life depended on it.
But I watched her kick ass at Stanford--both socially and intellectually--and it takes more than a pretty face to do that.
Which she crushed, and then she moved on and crushed the master's level courses.
And then got a job at Google. Of all the dot-com companies hiring on campus at the time throwing million dollar opportunities at new graduates, she picks the unicorn.
At some point it isn't luck anymore.
Anyway, I'll agree to disagree here. The post I originally responded to was a question about what is so special about her.
I only know what I saw when I could observe her. That my observations differ from yours is OK with me.
So she completed a second-rate major and luckily joined the fastest-growing company in US history ... that makes her smart and capable? Like OP, I know several people who knew her at Stanford (I didn't go there) and she was regarded with uniform disdain by everyone who was technically sharp.
I know several people who worked with her at Google, and she was fairly disliked there. She got frozen out and would have been eventually run out of the company had Yahoo not foolishly come calling. I WAS at Yahoo with her and I can verify that she did a terrible job there. Random decision making, company-wide initiatives that whipsawed from quarter to quarter, billion-dollar impulse acquisitions that almost immediately got written down. And let's not forget Polyvore - the 200m indulgence that she paid to her former assistant against the recommendations of the M&A team; that was just straight cronyism and corporate malfeasance.
True, Yahoo would have been a challenge for any CEO. But there were rational strategies that could have yielded some success. Marissa, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction and recklessly destroyed billions in shareholder value while pocketing hundreds of millions herself. Read the Kara Swisher articles on her at Recode. They were spot on. I heard a Business School professor on MSNBC argue that Marissa Mayer was the single most overpaid CEO in history. As a Yahoo employee who got to observe her tenure up close, I can't disagree. She's a terrible example for women in tech.
It's perfectly possible she was just promoted above her level of competence (Peter Principle in action). She may have been fantastically effective and successful at her job at Google (I don't know either way), but when trying her hand at the CEO job, it turned out it didn't match her skills. Not to mention Yahoo! wasn't exactly in great shape when she took the job; IMO the board screwed up (possibly intentionally): they needed someone with experience bringing a company back from the brink of failure, not someone who'd never been a CEO before.
Life is complicated. Being very smart is no guarantee of success. I’ve never claimed that she was infallible or perfect.
Even Gary Kasparov, Genoa Auriemma, and the Golden State Warriors fall off their perch eventually. It doesn’t mean they aren’t damn good at what they do.
I think it's very likely nobody is "lying" (why would they?) and still get conflicting opinions. It's not always easy to get a faithful picture of somebody's character (especially not if that someone wants you to get a certain view of them).
I've had people I've casually (sometimes in a business context) interacted with on several occasions & gotten a very positive impression, only to late be told a lot of negatives from people who knew them better.
One guy in particular was praised by my boss (also his ex-boss at the time), confirming my positive impression & years later a coworker of mine who worked under that person had a very negative view of them...
There are several possibilities but I think the most likely is a combination of 1. people act differently in different contexts 2. the same person can be good at one position/time and bad at another 3. people are not always honest with you & especially if they're good at it can come across the way they wish.
I wrote this somewhere else in this thread, but I like her because she's one of the few (current) 'well known' women in tech that's successful and stylish. She's exactly the kind of representation I need and want.
She's not successful, she's wealthy. There's a difference. She got a lottery ticket at Google and cashed in, then proceeded to run Yahoo into the ground. She's widely considered a failure in tech and business circles, and for good reason (I was with her at Yahoo and can testify to her strategic incompetence). If Marissa is the role model you want - stylish but incompetent - then I feel bad for you. Much like Elizabeth Holmes (another destroyer of billions), Marissa should be considered an anti-hero for women in business.
Don't feel bad for me, I'm twenty-something years old and having Marissa as my tech woman icon is just some fun. I'm sorry you don't like her, but the choices for role models as a woman in tech are limited. (And yeah I know about Hopper and Hamilton and Borg, the difference is that Mayer is a current kinda-household name and in Vogue, literally.)
Also don't lump Marissa in with Elizabeth Holmes, Holmes could never be iconic with that hair.
Maybe you'd find more role models if you didn't segregate by gender (that's sexist, after all). If you can only look up to people who share your genitalia then I think that's pretty limiting.
I don't think I'm asking for too much by wanting a woman in tech to look up to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it's not sexist dude, I just want some representation in my role models.
I mean, apart from everything else in this thread, Marissa Mayer doesn't really seem to have done much: a good management role in Google, tanking a former internet giant and getting a lot of money for it, and setting up a company that doesn't seem to have produced anything so far.
Even if you look for women role model in tech, is it possible there aren't any more successful ones?
It certainly seems like her looks and stylishness are major factors in her popularity (especially when compared to a more accomplished woman like Lisa Su), but you think that is a good thing?
Absolutely - as I said elsewhere in this thread, I hate the typical tech uniform of jeans, t-shirts, and hoodies, but felt I wouldn't get taken seriously if I looked 'pretty'. Marissa made that ok for me.
In contrast to my hypothesis: If you like her, feel free to share your thoughts or prove me wrong. What is special about her?