Barely an hour after longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer was announced as the new CEO of Yahoo, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen praised the move while on-stage at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen.
Contrasting Mayer with Yahoo’s interim CEO Ross Levinsohn (who was seen as another leading contender), Andreessen said this is “a big statement on Yahoo’s part.” He was careful to praise Levinsohn, but Andreessen said Levinsohn would have been more of sales- or content-centric CEO, whereas Mayer will be a product-centric CEO — and having another product CEO is “great for the valley.” In fact, he noted that Yahoo’s press release says the appointment “signals a renewed focus on product innovation.”
Andreessen also said he’s “super-happy” for Mayer, because she’s ready to step into a CEO role at a major tech company.
But can she actually turn Yahoo around? Andressen declined to offer any suggestions for areas that the company should pursue, and he also cautioned that it’s hard to think of many Web companies that succeeded in turning themselves around.
“On the other hand, it’s hard to overestimate how screwed Apple was in 1997,” Andreessen said. “Tech companies can in fact be turned around. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of Steve Jobs characters running around.”
Mr. Marc Andreessen is a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz. He is also co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter. He is an active member of the blogging community. Previously, Andreessen developed Mosaic and co-founded Netscape. Mosaic was developed at National Center for Supercomputing Applications, on which Andreessen was the team-leader. Andreessen co-founded what later became Netscape Communications which produced the ‘Netscape Navigator’. Netscape Navigator...
Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services. Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. To users, the Company provides owned and operated online properties and services (Yahoo! Properties, Offerings, or Owned and Operated sites). Yahoo! also extends its marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo! Properties through its distribution network...
Marissa Mayer is CEO of Yahoo. Previously as a VP at Google, Marissa Mayer led the product management and engineering efforts of Google’s local, mobile, and contextual discovery products including Google Maps, Google Maps for Mobile, Local Search, Google Earth, Street View, Latitude and more. At 36 years old, she was also the youngest member of Google’s executive operating committee. During her 12 years at Google, Marissa led product management and design efforts for Google web search, images, news,...
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