THE YAHOO DIASPORA: Where All Its Amazing Talent Ended Up
To start what she calls a "chain reaction," Yahoo must first hire talented designers and engineers, who will then build great products, which will then attract large audiences, which will then bring in advertisers.
To that end, she is buying startups on the cheap to bring in small, nimble teams and infuse Yahoo with new energy.
It is not the first time a Yahoo CEO has tried this strategy.
In the middle of the past decade, then-CEO Terry Semel and his top lieutenants bought a handful of Web 2.0 startups and also hired innovators to reboot Yahoo.
It was called the "Flickrization of Yahoo," after the famous photo-sharing site, the best-known of Yahoo's acquisitions. Yahoo would transform itself by letting its users create and share content, whether it was photos, event listings, or links. It was a bold strategy meant to counter Google's cold algorithms.
Then there was the day when Beck played a Hack Day event at Yahoo in September 2006.
Hack Days were all-day coding events meant to generate new products quickly, in a fun, loose, open way.
"When we all got together to play, it was explosive," recalls former Yahoo executive Kakul Srivastava. "It was a really generative time ... where openness bred creativity and innovation."
Beck's surprise appearance at that Hack Day "felt like a high point," Srivastava recalled—a sign that the whole company was backing the effort to hack Yahoo into something new.
The effort failed, for a variety of reasons: from Google's unstoppable rise, to a lack of focus that former Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse lambasted in a famous "Peanut Butter Memo," to a lack of engineering resources, to a stifling bureaucracy.
Yahoo, having started down this road early, also missed its chances to acquire the companies that would really matter in social media—YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
But it did have talent, in spades. And they are now pursuing their potential elsewhere.
Can Mayer put together a dream team that measures up to this generation? We'll see.