Marissa mayer is she was hired to be a coder at google. She was hired to be someone who literally makes the programs. Her first big project was supposed to be like googles first ad delivery system, you know . Google makes billions and billions of dollars off of ads, and she was going to make the first one. And it was taking her months and monthses and months to do. Google went out and hired someone named jeff dean and this sort of shocked the industry because jeff dean is a superstar. Hes really known for being one of the best coders on the planet. And he did the project that meyer had been work on in a matter of weeks. And mayer, you know, to her credit sort of looked at this and said is, you know, she loved working at google and she said im not going to make my mark at this company by being a coder. Is so she said what else can i do. So she sort of threw herself at whatever problems the company had. You know she actually got involved in pr and marketing and all sorts of strange things that a coder might not necessarily get into and she ended up finding a role for herself in the following ways she developed a rapport with the ceo, larry page and became sort of his number one lieutenant in the sense that she ran his meetings with the rest of googles staff. And she set the agenda for what is going to be discussed. And to do that, you know, she really had to need to know what his sort of vision for where google was going was. And the other thing she did was she got herself involved in the user interface review process so is that every product that went live on google had to go through this sort of checklist of launch, you know a checklist before it went to launch of design and had to meet her standards which really were googles standards for what a good product looked like. And the final thing mayer did over her many years at google, and this is just a broad picture, was she taught the company how to hire. Her boss for a long time was a guy named Jonathan Rosenberg and he kept bringing product manager, you know, in Tech Companies whats really important is project managers, people who can robe the edge rope the engineers together and push forward create new products. So Jonathan Rosenberg kept bringing people to larry page the thenceo of google, and page kept rejecting them all. And finally mayer said heres what youre doing wrong youre trying to hire mbas. Youre hiring them out of Great Schools and theyre really intelligent people, but page wants technical people inside of the company. What you need to do is hire people like me, people who are technically trained but have a real interest in business, maybe want to be ceo someday. And rosenberg said thats a good idea why dont you run such a program. Is so she created one, and its really its modeled across Silicon Valley now. Lots of Big Companies have this program where they go out and hire technicallytalented people from schools like stanford harvard, mit, what have you and put them in charge of managing groups at a very young age. Its sort of like throwing them in the deep end. This is interesting for mayer because not only was she still in charge of the look and feel of all google products, but also she started hiring googles future managers into the company. As these people went throughout the company, they had traditional bosses that they needed to report up to, but they also individually still reported in to mayer the person who was leading the apm program. So that meant she had a lot of power, at one, you know, what became the worlds most powerful internet company. So thats where mayer was for a long time, and she was doing a great job. And then my book gets into sort of, you know, she was demoted actually, toward the end of her career. But thats how she gained so much sort of influence and power in the world of the internet and technology. Host mr. Carlson, how many years was she at google and how much of the 700 million did she make from google . Guest yeah, thats right. So she was there let me see these figures off the top of my head, around 2000 to about to exactly 2012. So, you know, 13, 12, 13 years. She joined when there was 20 the employees, and she left when there was maybe 50,000. She made 300 million or so from working at google being one of those early employees. And so shes got fabulous wealth. Thats a fact. She lives just she has many moments, but theres two that we know of for sure and one is at the top of the four seasons in San Francisco, and another is in palo alto in a little neighborhood called professorville which is really near where stanfords campus is. Its funny, like many of the very wealthy people in palo alto, shes done this thing where she loves the neighborhood and its homey feel so much that shes decided to buy some of the homes around her just to make sure they stay nice and pleasant. Just like hometown, usa. Host how did she get to yahoo . How did she become ceo . Guest so this was a big upset, a big surprise that yahoo was able to hire someone hike Marissa Mayer. She came to back in so is, first, lets talk quickly about yahoo and the history of the company which actually takes up the first, you know, 150 pages of my 300page, 300pluspage book. So its, you know, what i wanted to explore is, you know, yahoo and how it got in such bad shape before mayer got there and why they needed someone like her possibly to come in and try to turn the place around. And just before mayer got there the company had gone through several ceos in a very short period of time. It had gone through a woman named carol barts, and after that there was an interim ceo named tim morrison and after that a permanent ceo named Scott Thompson who was pushed out of the company for lying on his resume and then theres an interim ceo named Ross Levinson and owl of that happened all of that happened within the period of a year. It was so tumultuous that there was a lot of expectation that is the company would just sort of say lets hire Ross Levinson, this interim ceo hes got a great name, hes been at yahoo for a while, hes got a vision of what to do with the company. So that sort of had been the expectation. And then one july day all of a sudden Marissa Mayer was hired as the ceo of yahoo , and people were shocked. Thats the reason why i got into reporting the story in the first place, because it was such an upset. Behind the scenes, in 2011 yahoo fired its ceo carol barts. She was in new york for a business trip. She gets a phone call theres a scene in the book, obviously, where i tell the story. Shes in new york, and she gets a phone call from the chairman who starts reading a script, and carol barts is famous for her very like, aggressive tone of conversation and she goes shes like roy sounds like youre reading from a script why dont you have the guts she said another word to actually talk to me and do this kind of thing in person. But anyway, she was fired. It was very public and very well known. And so meanwhile over at google in another scene in my book, one of mayers longtime confidants a person who had really helped her career along peter stricker, he came from the world of politic and he was a pr guy at google, and hed made her into something of a business celebrity along with i mean she obviously played more than a role. He helped. Anyway so he said to her gabriel said to mayer, you know, i think you would be a great fit for that yahoo role. And mayer said to him, you know, ive thought about that, thats a good idea. Thatd be exciting, but theres no way im doing that with yahoo s current board of directors. And the reason she said that, its something i detail in the book is that over its many years yahoo had a notoriously bad board of directors. These are people who that continued to hire talented ceos, but talented ceos who were really a bad fit for the company. People who didnt really have Technical Expertise people who sort of along the way prevented the company the from making sound business decision. There was a moment where yahoo had gotten a big offer, this was in the press in 2008 and after where yahoo got this very large offer from microsoft, and the company just sort of fumbled it. And kind of just pushed it off and said they wouldnt do it. And it was because of the board of directors in many ways, particularly a chairman. And so it was just a notoriously bad board of directors. What mayer didnt know in those weeks following carol barts firing in August September 2011, what she didnt know was way over across the country in new york theres a Hedge Fund Manager named dan loeb, and this is another chapter in the book. You know dan loebs job is to be an activist investor, you know . Hes made quite a lot of money doing this. He goes in and he buys larnlg stakes in public large stakes in Public Companies and then he says to the boards, listen, im now a big other than of your company, and i have some ideas for how you should be running the company, and its very different than how youre running the company. And so, you know, and by the way, if you dont do what i say im going to go to the other shareholders, and were going to get you fired speaking to the board of directors meaning basically, you know, Public Companies are in a way shareholder democracies. They can throw out the board of directors, and the board of directors can hire a new ceo who can set a direction for the company. So is dan loeb, what mayer didnt know, was that dan loeb had taken a 5 stake in yahoo and was really gearing up. Hed watched as many people had, hed watched disastrous behavior of the board for many years and thought this was an underperforming asset, and if only the board was removed, someone could be hired into that company and really run it. So dan loeb geared up, invested you know lots of money bought 5 of yahoo and launched whats called a proxy campaign, an activist campaign against the yahoo board and its ceo. And really pushed for it to hire someone like Marissa Mayer. He asked for the board member it is to resign. The board did not listen to dan loeb. They went out and hired a the president of paypal, which is another, its a division of ebay. And they hired this guy named Scott Thompson and loeb was aghast at this hire and actually thompson went into yahoo and all these sort of strange plans for what he would do with the company, a very draconian layoff planned, and he just sort of indicated that hed never been in the Media Business, and yahoo was a Media Business and it was just like the yahoo board once again hiring someone who was a perhaps talented executive but just not a good fit for the company. And loeb sort of said, you know, lets keep this proxy war going. And he eventually found he found that thompson had allowed for a long time there to be a mistake. You might say one might say that thompson lied on his resume about having a Computer Science degree from Stonehill College when, in fact, they did not offer a Computer Science during the years he was there. So loebs style his method of convincing other shareholders and boards of directors to listen to him is to write these scathing letters, what he calls them letters of mass destruction is what he actually calls them. So theres a scene in my book where after this war between dan loeb and Scott Thompson and the board of yahoo is going on for quite some time, maybe a few months its may 2012, and Scott Thompson is, the ceo of yahoo , is in a meeting around a ushaped table with all his executives, and one by one sort of like, you know, the mood of each executive starts to change. Theyre in this long meeting, but all of a sudden theres an electricity in the air and they start looking at their laptops and blackberries to see whats going on. And a reporter had just published a story saying that dan loeb had just published his latest letter, and he accused Scott Thompson of lying on his resume. And in this scene Scott Thompson kind of bolts upright and just bolts from the room and starts dealing with it. He didnt survive, you know, hes actually still got a lovely career going but he didnt survive his job at yahoo . And he was out within weeks. So that left yahoo with a ceo search. They promoted this Ross Levinson person that i was talking about before and he really had this plan for yahoo to make it sort of a media company, just carve it, much smaller that kind of thing. And instead of doing that, instead of hiring Ross Levinson, dan loeb whod been imagining that he would be on the board in short order had been out researching and speaking with people in the valley about what kind of ceo that yahoo needed. And they actually at one point met with a famous investor and the creator of netscape Mark Andreessen. And he told both dan loeb and another future board member of yahoo his name was Michael Wolff, who really led the search for the ceo, he told andreessen told these two what you need is when you have a tech company like yahoo , the product isnt necessarily like a product for a car company which is just, you know, a thing that comes off an assembly line. The thing that you make is innovation, and you really need a technical leader someone who has an understanding of how products are made in this environment, and thats how places like amazon and google and facebook are such Great Companies and apple, for example, as well. And so wolfe and loeb got it in their head was that what they needed was someone like larry page or mark zuckerberg, someone who has a real, like, native understanding of the web in a way that in a way that yahoo s prior ceos did not and that, you know, on their list and it was a pretty allstar list but on their list was Marissa Mayer whos this famous executive from google who had been instrumental in launching many of googles products over the years gmail, Google Maps Google search, thicks people things people use every day. Google products need to be something you use as often as you use your toothbrush. Its sort of difficult to come up with a product that is used that much, but that was googles goal and mayer was instrumental in making several that passed that test. They sort of thought it would be impossible to get her. They hired a recruiter who reached out to her mayer was now interested in the job because loeb had successfully through this letter of mass destruction we talked about, nuked the yahoo board and put himself on it instead. And so is she was interested in the job. She went in, and if theres one thing about Marissa Mayer, she is the best preparer in the world. If she knows she needs to have a set of data understood then she will have it understood and be able to be more than fluent on it. But convincing and so forth t. So she went in, and she completely blew the board away. And while there was some reluctance to hire her on the part of some Board Members because she had not actually run a profit, you know, a division with a profit and loss statement at google ever, there was some reluctance on that part. But eventually Michael Wolff and dan loeb were able to convince the rest of the board that she would be the right hire s. So they made this grand announcement in july, and it sort of shocked everyone. And a little piece of information was that she was pregnant, she was five months pregnant. So is here you have a 37yearold woman who was pregnant and the ceo of a massive internet company, and what how would she do . Thats what the world wanted the know thats what i wanted to know, and thats basically why i wrote the book. Host Nicholas Carlson in page 300 of your book, the honeymoon between maries saw Marissa Mayer and the roughly 15,000 employees lasted about a year. Guest thats right. So when mayer came in, there was an incredible amount of optimism for her. And she also took advantage of it and seemed to demonstrate that all the optimism was worthwhile. She came in, youll recall from the 2008 election president ial election, there was this famous shepherd ferry poster that was made of barack obama and on the bottom hes looking off into the distance, and on the bottom it says hope in capital letters. When mayer arrived at yahoo in july 201, there were poster of her done in the same tile with the word hope written underneath them, there was that sort of excitement in the company. These were in the actual hallways of yahoo . The founder of yahoo , one of the founders, theres two david fy low, met her at the front door and rolled out a purple carpet for her to enter the company on. She comes into the company, and her office is full of things like cupcakes, actually, because shes sort of a renowned cupcake cook enthusiast, or at least thats the impression the world has gotten through media coverage. Its actually not true, but thats the impression that the worlds gotten. Full of cupcakes and balloons, calls on her answering machine calls from the white house calls from jpmorgan, calls from ceos and celebrities of all sorts congratulating her on the job. Be and so there was this humongous enthusiasm and optimism for her arrival into yahoo . And she did great right away. I mean so some of the things that she did that were incredible, she really brought an increased level of transparency into yahoo . The way that yahoo employees learned what was going on at yahoo was not through, you know, the channels of communication from management but through reading reports on the company particularly reports by this woman we talked about before for a second, kara swisher. She would just sort of break news about yahoo all the time, and that was actually how people at yahoo knew what was going on. Mayer came in