The next person to win the Yahoo CEO lottery.

The Lottery, you say? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery

I remembered that there is a similar sci-fi story, and wanted to ask here first, but fortunately found what I think it was: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/204982/1950s-scien...

What’s marissa doing these days after running yahoo into the ground? Somewhere else satisfying a quota?

Yahoo was in all kinds of trouble when she took over. I'd argue she made a stupid mistake taking the job, not that they made a stupid mistake choosing her (whatever the motivation).

If it was on a downward trajectory she pointed the nose straight down and went full throttle.

I still remember how mad my then wife was about the childcare fiasco.

What a misogynist comment: What makes you say that Mayer got hired for being female?

They did play it up quite a bit, I remember being annoyed at the stories of how tough she was with her in-office daycare and support staff for her newborn while other non-celebrity women I know had to order their whole lives around a pumping schedule.

How does you being annoyed by the reporting on a CEO's daycare situation, let us deduce that this CEO was not hired based on merit?

Sorry, I wasn't trying to imply that. I don't think she was a diversity checkbox so much as a 'small world in silicon valley' unmeritorious hire, with the diversity checkbox as maybe a small plus.

She didn’t compete. She was a placement pick coming from google where she was essentially a non contributing member of the google adwords leadership team.

My only remaining exposure to Yahoo is the fantasy sports platform. Good luck new CEO

Sounds like a loser - out of the frying pan already on-fire and into another fire.

This is the most Yahoo move I've ever seen Yahoo do.

Feels like a lateral move motivated by money and perhaps boredom. Interesting too to contrast Tinder with Bumble which is founder led and growing. Mature stagnant shuffling companies CEO, you can see clearly that the energy is gone.

> Mature stagnant shuffling

It's worse than stagnant. I don't get why Verizon paid 9B for Yahoo and now is just selling it for 5B. Perhaps there's some bizarre finance logic behind it?

But wouldn't it have been better for Verizon and now Apollo Global to invest in fresh stuff instead of the VERY CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED DOWNWARD SPIRAL of the Yahoo brand? Did Verizon actually intend to revive the brand? It doesn't seem they did. Nor does Apollo Global which, it appears, are just a bunch of bankers.

Keep in mind that when a company is being sold the buyer is, almost by definition, the most optimistic of all the parties looking at the asset. So Verizon had some big plan where they could make a lot of money out of it. It was... too optimistic.

I have no idea what Verizon's plan was, but I assume Apollo's plan is to ride Yahoo into the ground, and they've forecast the present value of the revenue vs costs, and it works out.

I left Yahoo in 2011, but back then, profit margins were usually OK but not nearly as good as competitors. Mostly properties were run by small teams but competing ok against much larger dedicated companies. And then there was search; outsourcing it mostly to Bing but keeping a large team and crawling infrastructure to do customizations didn't make sense to me, but it's what happened.

I don't know how much of the small team enabled by corporate stuff + central advertising team still works at Yahoo, if it's still there, maybe there's hope.

I think GP was referring to Tinder as the place where mature stagnant shuffling is occurring.

All they wanted was the advert network. They valued the rest at 0, to be sold off, or shut down. The same with AOL.

OK, I see now that Yahoo is still making money, though it's been declining. They're now at just under 2 Billion in annual revenue. That's surprising!

They look to be little more than a news aggregator at this point, so it's just eyeballs from the inertia of users' force of habit to use Yahoo?

I suppose this gives a "life span" of, at most, a few years before the lights get turned off at Yahoo.

Yahoo Search is a massive search arbitrage business. Look deeper and you'll see a ton of revenue and profit. It's just a grimy business.

Do CEOs ever do such a bad job they don't get hired again? Seems like once you're in the club you just get to stay being a C-suite exec regardless of whether or not you ran a company into the ground.

Michael Spindler, Apple CEO from 1993 to early 1996, doesn't seem to have been a CEO at any other company since he was fired from Apple (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Spindler), although I don't know if this is because he couldn't find another position or because he wanted to do something different with his life; I know that he struggled with stress management during his career at Apple even before becoming CEO.

Michael Spindler presided over the successful PowerPC transition, but unfortunately he also presided over a catastrophic 1995 for Apple, where Apple had to contend with bad Performa x200/x300 models, faulty PowerBook 5300 models with many issues such as chipping and easily-breakable hinges (not to mention the exploding battery at the factory before release), and the release of Windows 95. Gil Amelio ended up taking over in 1996 to try to turn the company around; we all know what happened NeXT.

He was founder/co-managing partner at Upstart Capital from 1999 onwards, I'm not sure when that ended.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/upstart-capital

Its similar for CISOs and other exec positions.

Just look at some of the large breaches that happened like 5 years ago and where the CISOs of these companies work for now.

Breaches typically help them improve their profile and career in the long run (maybe you get to even speak in front of congrees) - it's very odd.

I think it has todo with people thinking, oh ,this person has seen some bad stuff - so the person must be experienced. Rather than maybe question if the root cause of the bad stuff (like a breach) was actually an incompetent exec.

you just get really good at spinning failures into tales of e x p e r i e n c e

But really sometimes you're just put in charge of a sinking ship, and sometimes you sink a perfectly fine ship. I suppose it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference.

I guess this mostly applies to CEOs of big (or once big) companies? I know a lot of former founders/owners/ceos of small startups that came back to IC roles after their companies went out of business.

Right, F2000 CEO and Startup CEO (like me) have nothing actually in common. After my current startup, I have no illusion I can walk into Pepsi and apply for the CEO role. (I mean, I could, but I would not get an interview).

Being big company CEO is a very very high wall to get over, but once you do it, I think you have a pretty good shot at keeping the CEO job for the rest of your career.

Startup CEO... might help get some funding in your next startup, or find co-founders easier. Not a lot though I expect..

In China they seem to have the willingness to go after CEOs that threaten the harmony of the State- or the hegemony of the CCP. Did anything bad happen after the guys who ran Lehman brothers into the ground?

Now Yahoo will adopt the controversial swiping model, where you'll filter out search results you might want to see with your thumb.

/s

If there were a search engine that let me do this with domains and/or authors, it would instantly win me over.

For real I wouldn't at all mind a feature akin to Apple News's 'suggest less/more from this source' in a search engine.

I'm not sure, I think personalized targeting algorithms tend to be way too aggressive in trying to guess what I want.

I really just want old Google where I can tailor my search terms and get what I really want, rather than machine learning trying to either overly target or overly "untarget" it, where it seems to try to guess what a completely average searcher would like, and ignore all the more specific terms in my search.

it's like no, I just want to search exactly what I typed, don't ignore half of it to get more general results or try to decide that I actually want something completely different because you know what city I live in

The worst is that every other dating app decided it needed to become a clone of Tinder after Tinder got big.

Is that actually a bad idea?

brb bootstrapping a “swipe to hide, swipe to read later” HN clone.

Speaking of Tinder, I've noticed that their algorithm seems to put a very attractive person when I first open the app (who almost never is a match for me) and then people I find less attractive after, often the 2nd or 3rd is someone who had already liked me. I think if I hit the "boost" feature, which is something crazy expensive, like $20, then they will show my profile to "more people" but more likely that means more people that I would find attractive.

My main question: when they and other social media control the algorithm and can almost predict when we will "win", at what point is this similar enough to a slot machine and the payout ratio should be regulated by an outside organization?

When the winnings are $USD, not just dopamine

Hmm, at first I thought it was a good point then thought about non-cash prizes in raffles and imagined those are also regulated. Also, carnival games, which depend on game of skill or chance, but still almost always non-cash prizes.

I wonder if it were more direct if it would be more likely to be regulated: people pay Tinder for each chance to swipe, $10 for 10 swipes. Then Tinder controls who appears in the swipes and can control how much someone "wins" (knowing if someone already liked them or the likelihood they would).

Just seems like it would be pretty easy to get better at making sure the house almost always wins.

I'm someone who's spent a fair amount on Tinder and other apps over the years. I definitely agree, the house always wins.

That being said, when they're the only house in town, you stop really worrying about whether you're truly getting your money's worth, because you know there's not really any alternative.

I guess I just wish we had a little more agency over how some companies worked, rather than only having the option to either stay or leave.

I wish we did too. In the dating app landscape, the biggest reason for this is that Match Group owns nearly every single player, with the only major holdout being Bumble.

I think if each app were allowed to compete individually, instead of as part of a pseudomonopoly, you'd see a much better experience for paying users like myself.

That being said, the "super like" I used yesterday to match with a woman who I'm taking out for dinner tonight cost me the equivalent of half a cup of coffee. Worth it? Who's to say.

Yeah, I wish mergers and acquisitions didn't make so much money so that there would be less incentive to let companies merge and get acquired.

> That being said, the "super like" I used yesterday to match with a woman who I'm taking out for dinner tonight cost me the equivalent of half a cup of coffee. Worth it? Who's to say.

I guess there's a part of me that wishes this were pure serendipity or good strategy on your part, and another part that feels suspicious that Tinder could just manipulate the process somehow by front-loading your match with people she'd really not find attractive or even would anger her, then land you right after. Maybe I give them too much manipulation credit and yet without any insight into how their algorithms work, I guess we just take their word for it or leave?

Also, just came up with a slogan that could maybe change how these orgs work (perhaps less so for Tinder but for more social media platforms): "No creation without representation."

*edit: fixed typos

Non cash prizes have a cash value attached. If the value of winning a carnival game was getting to date another carnival game winner then the government would stay well away from that financial transaction.

Ok, what if it were a raffle and the winner gets a date with a supermodel? That's a non-cash prize for which I think would be similarly difficult to assess the cash value and yet I imagine they would regulate that.

If the supermodel had to join the raffle against other supermodels, then it would be comparable to Tinder.

On Tinder, there are no picked winners. Even attractive people compete against each other.

I guess I just assume that Tinder could predict with pretty high accuracy which two people would want to match with each other and then determine whether to show those people to each other, based on numerous factors, one especially being how much someone pays.

Do you think Tinder is blind to which people are likely to match with each other?

Fair in that maybe it's too complex/not straightforward enough to regulate as other gambling is and maybe similar to video game pay-to-win dynamics, however I still think there is the ability to pull certain levers to control people's sensations of "winning" even if it requires matching two sides.

Why on earth would $USD and not dopamine be the line? And what about semi-fungible assets (e.g. virtual goods)

They sporadically front load you with people who have already liked you.

Yes, I guess I'm just saying it probably wouldn't be too hard for them to know whether you would probably like those people as well or if you would swipe on them but not be likely to message them much.

Again, just maybe it's me feeling more and more annoyed at how little control these companies give us to sort/filter our feeds and therefore how much they really can manipulate our experience (for better or worse), with our main semblance of control being leaving the platform.

Yawho? Aren’t they thoroughly dead yet?

You literally just read an article on a site owned by Yahoo - I think a lot of people don't realize how big the media side is. New CEO is a media guy before Tinder, so this makes sense.