Nicholas Carlson - Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

N early four thousand Yahoo employees sat and waited for Marissa Mayer to explain herself.

It was around ten thirty on Thursday morning, November 7, 2013.

Some of the employees, those in Yahoos Santa Monica and New York offices, sat at their desks watching a video feed on their computer monitors.

At Yahoos headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, just off US 101 in the heart of Silicon Valley, almost two thousand employees sat in a huge cafeteria.

The sunlit, windowed cafeteria was called URLs. It was named that because, when Yahoo was founded almost twenty years before, all it did was serve up URLs, website addresses. The earliest version of Yahoo was a directory of links on a gray web page with a friendly logo up top.

The name also worked because URLs sounded like Earls, and that suited the cafeterias 1950s diner motif. Walking into the cafeteria, you see a sign that reads: Eat at URLs. The sign is one whimsical touch among many in Yahoos headquarters. The campus is called the Hoo. The employees call themselves Yahoos. A statue of a purple cow greets visitors in the lobby. Theres an exclamation point at the end of every Yahoo logo.

The mood of Yahoo employees that day in November 2013 was not whimsical.

Some of the people in the room were angryangry about refused promotions and pay raises, angry that their jobs now seemed to entail an endless series of tasks done only because Marissa said so, or angry that new employees were coming into the company and making a lot more money. They were angry because, to them, it seemed like Marissa Mayer had said one thing and done another.

Most of the gathered Yahoo employees and executives werent so mad. They were just confused. They believed Mayer was brilliant, hardworking, and sincerely interested in the welfare of Yahoo, its employees, and its users. Theyd decided this after Mayer came to Yahoo from Google in July 2012 and brought with her sweeping changes that reenergized the entire company.

Before Mayer joined, Yahoos parking lots were empty for the weekend by 4:30 p.m. Thursday. It took years for Yahoo to refresh its products, while competitors took months or just weeks. Yahoos apps for Android and iPhone were embarrassing.

Within weeks of Mayers arrival, the lots were packed and the headquarters was humming till Friday evenings. Within months, Yahoo was launching products at a pace it hadnt hit in more than a decade. Within a year, Yahoo was winning awards and praise from the press for its product design. By the summer of 2013, tens of thousands of people were applying for Yahoo jobs every quarter. Yahoo finally had a team of hundreds working on apps for smartphones.

Now, in November 2013, the many Yahoos who had admired all Mayers progress wondered: Why was Mayer throwing away all the goodwill she had earned with a series of policies that were, at best, poorly rolled out and badly explained to employees or, at worst, plain mistakes. They wondered, more seriously than at any time since she joined, if Mayer was actually up for the job of saving Yahoo.

Mayer sat in front of them all, in a chair on a stage at the far end of the cafeteria. Next to her chair was a small table. Mayer had something with her. It looked like a book or a folder with an illustration on it.

A couple months before, fashion magazine Vogue published a photo of Mayer. In the photo, Mayer was lying upside down on a chaise lounge. Her blond hair was neatly fanned out and shiny like white gold. She was wearing a form-fitting blue Michael Kors dress, Yves Saint Laurent heels, and dark red lipstick. Her eyes held the camera, gazing sideways through half-closed lids.

That Thursday in November, Mayer looked like a different person. She looked agitated. Nervous. Her hair was wet. She wore no makeup.

Mayer knew about the confusion and the anger in the room. Shed been reading about it all week.

One of Mayers first moves after joining Yahoo was to institute a weekly Friday-afternoon meeting of all Yahoo employees, called FYI. The point of the meetings was to bring radical transparency to a company where, for many years, employees had to learn about what management was up to by reading the pressmostly reports from a journalist named Kara Swisher.

FYI meetings would begin with a confidentiality reminder. Mayer would announce new hires and work anniversaries. Then she would go over Yahoos wins of the week. Mayer or another executive would go into deep dives, giving presentations on topics like why Yahoo had acquired a certain company or how a new Yahoo product worked. At the end of the meeting, Mayer would take questions from Yahoo employees and either answer them herself or ask one of her direct reports to squirm in the spotlight.

Sometimes the questions would come in live from a Yahoo employee holding a microphone in URLs. More often, the questions were submitted during the week leading up to the FYI through an application called Yahoo Moderator on Yahoos internal network. Everyone in the company could see questions after they were submitted, and employees would vote on which questions they wanted Mayer to answer that week.

Over the next year, employees asked Mayer tough questions on confidential topics, and sheor one of her top executiveswould answer them with surprising candor. A popular topic: the status of layoffs and reorganizations reported on by the press. Another: Why was she blocking so many good hires? Whenever Yahoo spent millions of dollars to buy a startup, employees would demand an explanation from Mayer.