Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

(Paperback)

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Description

From her controversial rise and fall from power at Google, to her dramatic reshaping of Yahoo's work culture, people are obsessed with, and polarised by, Marissa Mayer's every move.

Back in the 1990s, Yahoo was the internet. It was also a $120 billion company. But just as quickly as it became the world's most famous internet company, it crashed to earth during the dotcom bust. And yet, Yahoo is still here, with nearly a billion people visiting it each month. Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! tells the fly-on-the-wall story of Yahoo's history for the first time, getting inside the board room as executives make genius calls and massive blunders.

Dan Loeb, a tough-talking hedge fund manager, set his sights on Yahoo in 2011. He grew up idolising the corporate raiders of the 1980s, building a career being more vicious than any of them. Without Loeb's initiative, Marissa Mayer would never have been given her chance to save the company. This book tells the tale of how Dan Loeb spotted the real problem inside Yahoo - its awful board - and tore it apart, getting two CEOs fired in the process.

When Marissa Mayer first started at Yahoo in 2012, the car parks would empty every week by 4.00 p.m. on Thursday. Over the next two years she made plenty of mistakes, but she learned from them. Now Yahoo's culture is vibrant and users are coming back. In Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! Nicholas Carlson also explores what may be the internet's first real turnaround.

Reviews

In this extraordinary tale, Nick Carlson takes the reader on an amazing roller-coaster ride, traversing Yahoo's ups and downs, and in the end leaving us not just with memories of a thrilling ride but with wisdom . . . Among the many virtues of this book is that Nick Carlson strives to understand, not punish, the amazing cast of characters in this long-playing drama - Ken Auletta, author and Annals of Communications writer, The New Yorker

Nicholas Carlson has written the inside story of one of the most fascinating tech leaders of our time, Marissa Mayer, and one of the most frustrating Internet giants of our time, Yahoo. This is a fast-paced, compelling, and detailed account of Mayer's valiant efforts to turn round a company and culture that helped create the Internet as we know it - Richard Wolffe, executive editor, MSNBC.com, and author of The Message

Before there was Google or Facebook or even Amazon, there was Yahoo. It was the Internet to many in the 1990s. But it has been sick for more than a decade. In this fascinating, deeply reported tale, Nicholas Carlson, for the first time, tells us why. It's an astonishing story of mistakes and missed opportunities polluted by a startling lack of vision almost from the beginning - Fred Vogelstein, author of Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, and contributing editor, Wired magazine

Carlson portrays Mayer as an interesting blend of contradictions - Observer

Nicholas Carlson . . . has done a superb job of bringing to life the dramatic story of Yahoo and how 39-year-old Mayer is faltering in her role as its saviour - Financial Times

Mayer remains the most interesting thing about Yahoo. And she appears to be unstoppable - Australian Financial Review

Author Bio

Nicholas Carlson is Business Insider's chief correspondent. His investigative reporting re-wrote the histories of Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon. His coverage of Yahoo won Digiday's award for 'Best Editorial Achievement' of the year. Carlson is a frequent guest on CNBC and contributes to the Bloomberg biography series, Game Changers.