#194

When Marissa Mayer was first hired as the CEO of Yahoo, the company had lost nearly a quarter of its workforce in the preceding six months. Early on, she was chatting with employees in the cafeteria and one of them got her attention by smacking her tray. “Is it go time?” he asked. He was asking if the board and C-suite were ready to lead the company forward, but Marissa thought he had one foot out the door. “I had just come out of this meeting where they were like, ‘Everyone’s leaving!’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Oh no, please don’t go, I’ve only been here for four days!’”
In this episode, Marissa and Joubin discuss the number 12, contacts and photo sharing, fear of AI, soccer moms, maternity as a “disability,” mothers’ rooms, Jim Citrin, Project Cardinal, HTML5 vs. native apps, Ross Levinsohn, Lori Puccinelli Stern, Joe Montana, David Karp, Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift, hiring at Google, Amit Patel, Hamilton, John Doerr, and the Google APM program.
Chapters:
00:52 Reading your own press
04:55 Marissa’s lucky number
07:19 Her latest startup, Sunshine
15:03 Burnout, resentment, and rhythm
21:46 The opportunity to become CEO of Yahoo
27:00 Inverting maternity leave
31:14 The big interview
36:44 An epic dinner party
42:51 The voicemail
47:18 Farzad “Zod” Nazem and David Philo
50:25 Last day at Google
53:52 “Is it go time?”
59:03 Buying Tumblr
01:04:46 Alibaba and Verizon
01:06:24 Larry and Sergey bucks
01:11:05 Eric Schmidt’s advice
01:12:59 In the room at Google
01:18:36 Teaching and identifying talent
01:24:32 Who Sunshine is hiring

[@ryanarmendariz8003]

This is one of the best Grit podcasts to date. So much cool perspective she hasn't shared before.