Nicholas Carlson

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! Nicholas Carlson Unabridged edition

A page-turning warts-and-all narrative about Marissa Mayer's efforts to remake Yahoo as well as her own rise from Stanford University undergrad to CEO of a $30 billion corporation by the age of thirty-eight.

When Yahoo hired star Google executive Marissa Mayer to be its CEO in 2012, employees rejoiced. They put posters on the walls throughout Yahoo's California headquarters. On them was Mayer's face and one word: hope.

Just over a year later - on November 4, 2013 - Mayer sat in front of those same employees in a huge cafeteria on Yahoo's campus and took the beating of her life. Her hair wet and her tone defensive, Mayer read and answered a series of employee-posed questions challenging the basic elements of her plan. There was anger in the room; and behind it, a question: Was Mayer actually going to be able to do this thing?

Nicholas Carlson's fast-paced narrative is the inside story of Mayer's controversial rise at Google, her desperate fight to save an Internet icon, and how Yahoo got into such awful shape in the first place.