Marissa Mayer New Consumer Media and Artificial Intelligence Venture
Marissa Mayer is launching a new tech incubator in Palo Alto’s luckiest office building
Ten months after successfully negotiating Yahoo’s $4.5 billion sale to Verizon, Marissa Mayer is back with a new venture — a technology incubator in downtown Palo Alto that will focus on consumer media and artificial intelligence.
Ten months after successfully negotiating Yahoo’s $4.5 billion sale to Verizon, Marissa Mayer is back with a new venture — a technology incubator in downtown Palo Alto that will focus on consumer media and artificial intelligence.
“Thinking about what’s next, I returned to my roots, rented the original Google office where I started my career, and founded a lab with my longtime friend and teammate [Enrique Muñoz Torres],” Mayer tweeted late Wednesday.
Thinking about what’s next, I returned to my roots, rented the original Google office where I started my career, and founded a lab with my longtime friend and teammate @eamunozt. A bit of info: http://www.lumilabs.com
Mayer and Torres are launching Lumi Labs at 165 University Ave., a small office building that’s been home to some of the Internet’s biggest success stories, like Google, PayPal Holdings, Logitech International and Danger.
“I rented the old Google office. So this is actually the office where I started my career in 1999. This is also where PayPal started, so there’s a lot of good juju here,” Mayer said in a lengthy interview with The New York Times published on Wednesday. “Coming back here, it reminds me of what Google felt like in those early moments. I remember running up those steps, because if you didn’t get here fast enough on Saturday morning, someone in the world was going to get worse search results, and it might change their life for the worse.”
Mayer joined Google in 1999 as employee number 20, and was pivotal in the company’s development of AdWords — now a multibillion-dollar business.
She left the search giant in 2012 to lead Yahoo as its eighth and final CEO. There, she ordered an acquisition binge, buying more than 40 companies in hopes of capitalizing on mobile apps, social networking and original content. That notably included the company’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr in 2013.
But Yahoo struggled to grow, despite expensive experiments in original content. In 2014, hackers stole data from at least 1 billion Yahoo users in a pair of separate attacks. The company, led by Mayer, decided not to tell users of the hacks until late 2016, during its acquisition talks with Verizon Communications.
Mayer walked away from the mid-2017 acquisition with more than $186 million in stock, and a golden parachute of $3 million in cash and nearly $20 million in bonus equity, the company said at the time.
“I’m proud of what we achieved at Yahoo. That said, we had a quickly decaying legacy business. All we really managed to do was offset the declines,” she told the New York Times in Wednesday’s story.
In launching Lumi Labs, Mayer is the latest wealthy Silicon Valley executive to launch an incubator or investment fund.
Across town in Palo Alto, Android cofounder Andy Rubin is running Playground Global, his hardware-focused tech incubator. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers are both running their own investment funds.
From the Silicon Valley Business Journal:
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/04/19/marissa-mayer-palo-alto-tech-incubator-lumi-labs.html
Written by Luke Stangel, Contributing writer