Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo review – the failing giant and the unlikely geek

Why Marissa Mayer jumped ship from Google – and how she changed a ‘pathologically relaxed’ company

Of all the western world’s internet giants (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft), Yahoo has had the most chequered history. It was founded in 1994 by two Stanford graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, which was basically a hierarchically organised, human-curated directory of websites. After a few months and a frantic search through dictionaries, the founders renamed it Yahoo.

It grew rapidly in the late 1990s, riding the crest of the first internet boom and metamorphosing into a “portal” – a gateway to the web. By 1999, Yahoo had 4,000 employees, 250 million users and $590m in annual revenues – much of it from advertising by dotcom firms. In March 2000 its market cap peaked at $128bn.

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