“Scarcity brings clarity,” says Marissa Mayer, the blonde cyborg who runs Google’s search engine
“Scarcity brings clarity,” says Marissa Mayer, the blonde cyborg who runs Google’s search engine, in a BusinessWeek interview. She makes fun of Dilbert-style managers — but in reality, she shows how she’s turned into one.
Mayer, a striking Midwestern blonde with a nerdy laugh, was employee No. 20 at Google, and she eagerly grabbed authority as she rose from engineer to director to vice president. (Google is stingy with titles, so an executive slot there is vastly harder to get than at, say, a bank, where even a branch manager can be a VP.)
But what, exactly, does she do? She works long hours, she tells interviewers. But it’s not clear what she spends her time on. Spreadsheets of cupcake recipes? Employees report that she’s famous for not preparing for meetings, making spur-of-the-moment decisions on products based on five-minute presentations.
And how does she make her decisions? Based on the “user experience,” which pretty much means whatever Mayer thinks is right. Oh, sure, she goes through mounds of data — but anyone who’s worked with spreadsheets knows there’s always a way to make the numbers say what you want them to say.
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Many people ask us if Jason Calacanis, the Internet entrepreneur, is stupid.
Many people ask us if Jason Calacanis, the Internet entrepreneur, is stupid. No, but he says stupid things. While he’s an expert at timing the market, his plan to fix the economy is all backwards.
It’s actually not surprising that Calacanis has attracted a small group of loyal followers who hang on his every word. Let’s review the evidence: He ran a tech magazine in the ’90s but failed to cash out big. Dumb! He sold a bunch of blogs to AOL for $25 million in 2005, before everyone figured out blogs weren’t worth very much. Smart! He squeezed $40 million out of Sequoia Capital, a notoriously tightfisted venture-capital firm, before things went bust in the Valley and Sequoia started telling everyone to lay people off. Smart! He stopped blogging when he realized that it just gave angry people on the Internet a platform to bash him. Smart!
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