YouSaid · the spoken record

Marissa Mayer

lines on the record: 40
first: 2018-08-08
most recent: 2018-08-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale is a weightwater original. The show is recorded on site in California and produced at the studio Inside SY Partners in New York. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers are Chris MacLeod, Adam Skeuse, Jenny Cataldo, Dan Kedmy, and Ben Manila. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Original music and sound design is by the Holiday Brothers. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pew. Special thanks to Christier, Bob Safian, Elisa Schreiber, David Sanford, Saida Sepieva, Christina Gonzalez, and Sarah Sandman. Visit Masters of Scale. com to find the transcript for this episode and be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Since leaving Yahoo, Marissa has set up Loomy Labs to work on new projects. Its location is somewhere very familiar to both her and me, the original Google Office.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because one of the things that I tracked as an outsider in this was that to really succeed in a turnaround, you need enough time because you need to have enough time to have culture change, whether you're generating the ideas from the very smart people in the company or bringing in new ideas. You need to be able to collectively buy into those ideas and kind of organize around them. And so a time frame is necessary. And the weird thing is it was like a fuel pack that came with a fuse, right? Because one of the things he's like, oh, we have all these resources to do stuff. On the other hand, it caused the fuse to suddenly get very short as it appreciated. And all of a sudden your time frame was completely shortened on you.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what would you have told yourself to do differently? Like, if you said, okay, now I ran the course, these are the things I would have done differently, these are the questions I would have asked, this is how I would have approached it.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marissa and her executive team came up with a plan that would please both groups of investors. The core Yahoo business would remain an independent company and go public. The Alibaba assets would be spun off as a separate company. But that first plan proved problematic.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The new growth was awesome, but it wasn't enough. Yahoo's board was anxious to cash in on the Alibaba holdings. The best way to do this would be to separate Yahoo from its Alibaba investment, but new government rules were making this more difficult. The board, including Marissa, voted to wind down this chapter of Yahoo's existence. They sold the Yahoo Core assets to Verizon and kept the Alibaba holdings and a new company called Altababa.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a rocket pack that helped Yahoo defy gravity. A sell-off of some of the Alibaba sock brought an influx of cash that could be spent on the new ideas that were sprouting up. But that rocket pack also came with a short fuse, and that fuse was lit when investors became eager to cash out the Alibaba holdings. Marissa and her team ran out of time.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With that, we've reached the end of our investigation into this theory on making the employees you need when you can't find them. But I want to take a few minutes with Marissa as she reflects on her time at Yahoo. I promise that the top of this episode we'd spend some time with Marissa talking about what happened at Yahoo and where she believes things went wrong. But just in case I haven't already made this clear, Yahoo was a deeply troubled company when Marissa came on board. Once a pioneer in search and email, Yahoo had been steadily losing users and relevance for years. The company was treading water as its competitors raced by on jet skis. For many of its investors, the only real value they saw left in the company was the ownership stake it held in two other companies the Chinese internet giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. At the start of Marissa's tenure, Yahoo's Alibaba investment”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The outpouring of new ideas at Yahoo led to new revenue on a very large scale. Marissa's efforts to make the employee she needed from the one she already had allowed her to gain ground. And there's a lot that other leaders can take from that. But ultimately, she ran out of time. And this is where we hit a key limitation of my theory. Building people with the skills you need is far easier at a smaller scale startup. The company culture is still being formed and you have a longer timeline. It's not impossible in a larger company. It's absolutely worth pursuing. But you have to keep your eye on the clock.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Notice how Marissa made employees part of the process. She could have cut through bureaucracy from the top down with edicts and pronouncements, but by engaging employees in the process, by making them her partner in routing out bureaucracy, they became part of the solution. And this can start the transition from a cynical and disengaged team to a renewed and engaged one. With the underbrush clearing out, Marissa wanted to encourage new ideas to flourish. Yahoo wasn't the fresh slate that Google had been, so Marissa didn't have the opportunity to cede the primordial goop of a new company. But what she could do was bring up the dormant ideas and the long dormant passion that could turn the company around. She could take the employee she had and make them into the idea generating employees she needed. So she issued something she called”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Under PBNJ, anyone in the company could suggest a problem for the red tape machete to take on as long as they also propose the solution for it.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You might find this surprising. Many people in Silicon Valley saw Yahoo as the walking dead, but even the most zombified of companies can still have employees with a flash of passion in their eyes. Sure, a lot of the more ambitious people will have left, those who remain, and especially those who want to run and go and do will feel stifled by the system that has risen around them, and they will resent it. The best way to overcome this is to say, hey, all this stuff you've been putting up with for all of these years, well, I'm here to clear those things away so you can focus on bringing your ideas to life.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When Marissa arrived at Yahoo in July 2012, the energy and enthusiasm at the company lay dormant, stifled by layers of bureaucracy and years of mismanagement.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yahoo had burned through four CEOs in five years, a full twenty five percent of the staff had quit in the past six months, so Marissa was taking on a nearly impossible situation. When an entrepreneur takes on a turnaround, I often describe it as throwing yourself on a grenade, but this was like throwing yourself on an entire truck of TNT. It's not surprising then that Marissa's time at Yahoo was fraught with controversy, and we'll get to that. But I want to look here at what she did when she first arrived, because there's a lot to learn from. In this turnaround situation, Marissa couldn't hire an entirely new team at scale, but she could make the employees she needed out of the ones she had. Yahoo was obviously this super important company on the internet that had gotten into trouble by a bunch of bad strategic and management choices, and they were desperately looking for reinvention.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These alumni of the APM program ultimately moved on to other companies in Silicon Valley and eventually it was Marissa's turn. In 2012, Marissa got the call from Yahoo. Yahoo was looking for a turnaround CEO to reignite the company's fire. In the 1990s, Yahoo pioneered many of the online services we take for granted today, but it failed to capitalize on them again and again. The list of squandered opportunities reads like a Shakespearean tragedy.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It comes to Google's crowning achievements. I believe the APM program sits right up there with Gmail, search, maps, and AI. In the program's first year two thousand two, Marissa hired eight APMs. By two thousand eight, she was hiring twenty a year. To date, around five hundred APMs have gone through the program. Indeed, the list of APM alumni reads like a who's who of overachievers in Silicon Valley.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The APM program created a secret circulatory system through Google's famously decentralized management structure. Google had grown organically with ideas and teams sprouting from the bottom up, largely driven by engineers with big ideas. This kind of controlled chaos is a great way to foster innovation. And our episode with Google's former CEO, Eric Schmidt, talked a lot about this. But the downside of controlled chaos is that it's difficult to scale. New teams and projects don't have strong connections to each other or even to the management team. And without support, projects die on the vine. For Google, the APM program created an informal but highly effective network of support throughout the organization, driven by personal ties among managers and teams. And this secret circulation system allowed ideas to spread. It brought resources to”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Google's APM program became a well oiled machine that found smart young tech generalists and made them into the product managers that Google needed. But the program also had an unexpected benefit, one that proved equally important.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, there's nothing new about role rotation itself. This kind of training program reaches heyday in the fifties and sixties with companies like IBM and General Electric. These emerging Titans of industry needed new leaders to keep up with the unprecedented leaps in scale and technology. They couldn't hire the people they needed, so they had to make them instead. I wanted to get a sense of how programs like this work outside of tech. So I reached out to Karen Kirkland, a VP at Nickelodeon. For the past thirteen years, Karen has led the Nickelodeon writing program under her leadership program became one of the leading trading grounds for TV writers. Its alumni can be found not just on Nickelodeon shows like Door the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants, but also on shows like Silicon Valley, Modern Family, and Blackish.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the beginning, Google's APM program was founded on the principle of exposing new product managers not just to one product, but to many. At the core of the program was a yearly rotation that moved the new product managers between different departments, even if some of them were reluctant at first.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marissa named this trial by fire, the associate product manager program. Listeners, Bob, here, if you listen to rapid response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the Devilware's Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see there.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marissa found her first APM higher 22-year-old Brian Rakowski, fresh out of college. What project did Marissa choose to ease him in on? She gave him the whole of Gmail.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marissa was convinced she could hire smart people and train them to be the colleague she was looking for. She was confident about it because that's what she and Salar had done. They had come to Google as coders and had become product managers”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Synthesizing new humans was not yet an option even at Google, and they were struggling to find qualified candidates. So Marissa decided to make more of these people. It grew out of a bet with her manager, Jonathan Rosenberg.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the company grew increasingly complex, there was a new imperative. They needed more of these product managers. People with minds nimble enough to cover any and every aspect of Google's rapidly increasing range of products, and who could quickly achieve the same impressive level of mastery that Marissa, Salar, and Susan commanded. But how could they get them? It reminds me of that classic John Hughes film Weird Science. You just need to tweak the tagline from two high school nerds attempt to create the perfect woman, but she turns out to be much more than that. 2. A bunch of Silicon Valley nerds attempt to create an army of product managers, but they turn out to be much more than that.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As Google grew, the company became more and more difficult for newcomers to navigate. Their small teams could develop products quickly, but every person had a narrow view. This structural challenge didn't go unnoticed by Google co founder Larry Page. He did a tour of other more established companies to see how they were organized.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clearly, we're not talking here about Felipe Stark style design. This isn't about beauty or style, but cold hard data driven functionality. Marissa wasn't asking what looked best. She was asking what performed best. She became the kind of data driven designer that Erz had set out to find. Marissa was quickly making huge leaps at Google. Along with setting Google's design Bible, she was playing a lot of hard-to-categorized roles across the company. There were many small teams working on different products and features, and when it came time for them to go live, they would turn to Marissa for help. This gave her a clear view of every product and every team throughout the organized chaos of the entire company. She was also one of the few people who knew how Google's increasingly complicated systems worked.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She then took her love of data and did what any coder would do. She hacked her way into making design decisions. Famously, she would take this approach to extremes when testing what color was best for enticing users to click on ad links.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Urissa was no designer, but she knew how to get data, and she knew the design questions that were plaguing Google's engineers.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bruce's boss at the time was Google's VP of Engineering, Erz Hosley, and Erz realized they wasn't going to find somebody with that rare combination of skills, so he decided to make the right person. And he didn't have to look far for his candidate. He told Marissa that she was the person for the job.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Marissa took the plunge and became Google employee number twenty. She soon found herself working across a whole host of projects. She started looking to hire a systems engineer to take some of the pressure off. But this being Google, the engineer would need it nearly impossible, exotic range of skills. They'd need knowledge of artificial intelligence for building out Google's complex search algorithms, and they'd also need to know about design so they could work on Google's front end, the part that users saw. It wasn't an easy hire.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marissa is well known for her intense use of data when she makes decisions. Indeed, it has been the target of much criticism, but what people overlook is that she's not making choices based solely on the data she collects. Each table of data she builds is like a diving board. The higher she builds it, the wider the view, and the bigger the splash when she jumps. But whether she actually takes that dive or not, that's still based on intuition.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They drew up charts and plotted graphs. They buried their heads in the numbers. After six hours churning data, Marissa looked up to see the sun had set, her head was spinning, and she felt no closer to a decision.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solar Comengar, the Googler, who sent that email, was Google Employee Number nine for those keeping count. He's now senior vice president of UT, now Marissa had another offer, fourteen to choose from. It's the kind of problem most newgrads wish they had. How did she decide? Methodically. Marissa enlisted help from Andre Vanier, a fellow Stanford student who is now a VP at Oath.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time at Yahoo was controversial, and we'll talk about that. But we're going to start at the beginning. Marissa was still a college student, and Google was one of a thousand teeny Silicon Valley startups competing for talent.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is one of the untold stories about many companies that have changed the world. These companies needed to hire for roles that had never existed before. They couldn't always find the people they needed, so they made them instead. And these people, in turn, made the companies what they became. I wanted to talk to Marissa Meyer about this because at Google, she created one of the company's least known secret weapons. The program that hired and trained Google's product managers You may not have heard of the associate product manager program, but it's one of Google's crown jewels alongside search and Gmail, and I would argue that it sits at the root of Google's success. Marissa herself is one of Silicon Valley's more famous names. She joined Google as employee number twenty and their first female engineer.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is Masters of Scale. I'm Reed Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, Investor Greylock, and your host. And I believe when you can't find the right people to help your company scale, you have to make them. Being in a rapidly scaling company can feel like being the lead in your own superhero saga. Each day pitch you against new problems that feel like they need superhuman levels of endurance to overcome. And there will come a point in your adventure when being a lone crusader just won't cut it. That's when you need to enlist some help. But assembling a squad of fully formed superheroes with the precise skill sets you need may prove tricky. The solution? Think like Professor Xavier of the X-Men. Go forth and find young promising talent. Guide them in developing their powers and form them into a close-knit squad who will always have each other's backs. If you do it right, you'll create a formidable force, and their achievements will echo throughout your company and beyond.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Adventures of Captain Hoffman and the Masters of Scale have long since left the airways, but their story still holds important lessons because like a band of superheroes, your company will have its own origin story, and you won't always be able to find the heroes you need. You may find that your competitors have tied up all the star employees, and when that happens, you'll have to mold your own superheroes and turn them into an unstoppable force. I believe when you can't find the right people to help your company scale, you have to make them.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That may be so, but you overlook all the raw young talent out there, but not me. I sat out the most promising students and molded them into the heroes the world needs to defeat you Surround him,”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it is I, Captain Hoffman, Instigator of Innovation, Upholder of Originality, an advocate for inspiration, and I'm here to put an end to your nefarious ways, mediocrity, once and for all.”
2018-08-08 · Masters of Scale · How to make the star employees you need, w/Marissa Mayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT