During a December 2010 fireside chat, TechCrunch founder (and then-editor) Michael Arrington asked Marissa Mayer what she would do if she hypothetically ran Yahoo.
As you all know, Mayer was VP at Google at the time, but left on Monday to become the CEO of Yahoo. The oddly prophetic interview is even more interesting to watch now that Mayer has taken the Yahoo position.
Here’s the (slightly cleaned up to remove “um,” etc.) Yahoo bit:
Arrington: Do you mind if we do some what-ifs, just for fun? Like, if you ran Yahoo, for example, what would you do?
Mayer laughs
Arrington: Just theoretically. Would you cut back? Lay everyone off, like they’re doing? Would you try to expand in a certain area? I’m just curious.
Mayer: I think if I were Yahoo—I think, one, it’s a difficult job. But I do think Carol’s done a lot of smart things. The partnership on search was smart in many ways. We would’ve liked the partnership to have been with us. But that was smart. I also think that looking at other really interesting brands that are getting a lot of traction on the internet—those are smart acquisitions for them to make to really help broaden out their base, broaden out their platform and ultimately stay relevant.
It’s no longer a hypothetical. The difficult job is Mayer’s and now we get to sit back and see how her thoughts have changed over the past two years and how they will translate into action.
Mayer and Arrington will sit down again at TechCrunch Disrupt in September; the last time Arrington interviewed the Yahoo CEO at Disrupt, it was quite colorful.
The full video is below; if you just want to watch the Yahoo piece, it starts around 28:10
Thanks to Adrianne Jeffries for the heads up.
J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a number of startups, venture funds and investment banks. He...
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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