Well, it's no small thing to divest a big chunk of equity like that without crushing the value. There are a few ways you can do it, but you need someone empowered to actually execute on it for the board. That's the CEO's job. She did a good job in that.
And yeah, she made some bad acquisitions. But most of these types of acquisitions fail (it's not like great companies put themselves up for sale -- just look at Microsoft's or HP's acquisition history) and the losses on those acquisitions were more than made up for by the additional amount she was able to get for the combined Alibaba + Yahoo. She basically ended up spinning off the entire value of the Alibaba stake plus $4.5 billion -- which is about $5 billion ahead of where the company was at when she started (remember the articles basically saying Yahoo's operations were worth negative money?)
I wouldn't think of HP or post-Gates Microsoft as very good examples of how to run a publicly-traded tech firm.
The market value of the company almost always is not equal to what the company could sell itself for to another company. In this case, the board would have likely gotten much more for the shareholders by spinning off Alibaba and selling the rest rather than hire Mayer.
For example:
- She did some very bad hires such as Henrique de Castro who in 15 months got over 100 million in salary, stock and severance.
- She wasted billions on acquisitions that did not add value.
- Most of the comments from Yahoo employees since she was hired were never very good, and her behavior with employees was said to sometimes be somewhat bizarre (such as reading a children's book at a comm meeting) or essentially throwing a company party where she is the guest of honor.
I don't know the numbers for sure, but with the security breaches, web site redesigns and inability to get ahead of technology trends, I think user engagement with the site is likely less than when she started.
Your anti-female bias is showing here. Polyvore has been profitable for years. I have a friend who works there and loves it.
Step back for a minute and think about how this relates to sexism at all. It is you who associated these two concepts together. You are the one who's being sexist. Once you take off your sexist glasses and see things clearly, you'll realize you are making as huge logical fallacy as the one you're criticizing.
Sexism needs to stop but comments like this are what makes it hard.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/31/why-polyvores-jess-lee-sol...
> "Yahoo bought Polyvore in what we’ve heard could be anywhere from a $25 million* to $60 million"
Quickly followed up by an update revealing it was actually ~10x more!
In specifically marginalizing a profitable business acquisition just because he'd assumed it was frivolous by its' nature.
I still don't understand. Can you please elaborate?
If that was the case she never would have been given the job. That's something any old bean counter could do and they wouldn't require hundreds of millions of dollars for the babysitting job.
She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?).
Some examples:
* Tumblr - $1.1b with the majority of that later written off because they have only figured out how to keep losing money
* Polyvore - $230m A fashion search engine run by people she used to mentor at Google
* Summly - $30m to a teenager for a news app that was shut down and never heard of again