Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer returns to her Google roots, talks #MeToo
She says she is running a laboratory in old Google space
Marissa Mayer has been out of the spotlight for nearly a year after her departure as Yahoo CEO in June 2017.
But Mayer has not been holed away at some island resort or mansion estate in the countryside. She’s been in an office in Palo Alto, the same office where she started her 13-year career at Google in 1999, according to a New York Times interview with Mayer on Wednesday.
“This is also where PayPal started, so there’s a lot of good juju here,” Mayer told the Times.
Mayer says she is running a laboratory in the space called Lumi Labs — named after the Finnish word for snow. The 42-year old Wisconsinite says she has “some ideas in the consumer space” and is still in the brainstorming phase as she meets with other founders to learn about the industry.
Mayer expressed little regret about her experience as CEO of Yahoo, which has since been bought by Verizon and re-branded as Oath. Mayer also said she left Google for Yahoo because she had “huge respect” for the Sunnyvale-based company, which in the late 1990s “was the internet.”
In June 2017, Mayer resigned from Yahoo as Verizon completed its acquisition of the internet pioneer for $4.5 billion. She turned
over control to former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and received $23 million in a severance package.
“I’m proud of what we achieved at Yahoo,” said Mayer. “That said, we had a quickly decaying legacy business. All we really managed to do was offset the declines.”
Mayer revealed that she realized that Yahoo’s time
as the dominant web search giant had been usurped by Google, her former employer, and regaining customers would be a tough uphill climb.
“I would say one of my key learnings from Yahoo is that timing is everything,” Mayer told the New York Times. “There was a time when Yahoo’s offerings could consume hours a day, and trying to regain that moment in time was really hard. We could make the products really good, but regaining that contextual relevance
that was afforded to Yahoo in 1999 and the early 2000s was difficult.”
Mayer, who was the first female engineer at Google, also weighed in on the #MeToo movement, in which women have called out men in power over sexual harassment and assault. She said she would like to take a “longer-term view” through which Silicon Valley can examine this in a “concentrated way, fix the problems and move on from them.”
“What we don’t want to do is dissuade that next set of leaders, entrepreneurs, executives from even entering the field,” said Mayer. “I don’t want us 15 years from now to turn around and be like, ‘Wait, how come there’s so few women V.P.s at all these companies? Oh, right, it’s because in the summer of 2018, there was all this happening and it caused people to make wildly different career de- cisions.’ “