Earlier today in Davos, Switzerland, Marissa Mayer gave her first televised interview since becoming Yahoo CEO.
Bloomberg Television scored the scoop.
We've embedded the 30 minute video below.
First, highlights from the transcript, provided by Bloomberg:
Mayer on arriving at Yahoo and what she has focused on over the last several months:
"Overall, I was genuinely pleased and surprised. I knew there had to be great people at Yahoo the same way when you look at art, you can tell whether it was created by a nice person or not, a depressed person or not. When you feel Yahoo's products, you can tell there are very nice, really competent, pleasant people that have a great time. It is a great company overall that has a very fun culture. For my first few months, my focus was on people. I believe technology companies live and die by talent. That's why when people talk about the talent wars…when you see the best people migrating from one company to the next, it means that the next wave has started. I got very focused on people, building the right team, particularly the executive portion, but all throughout the business, and also the overall environment. I wanted to make sure that Yahoo is the best place to work and that people really want to come and work there. That will help the talent piece. Also because I also believe that really strong companies have strong cultures. Yahoo has been no exception. It has a strong culture. It is different from every other corporate culture. Each has their unique and individual flavor. I wanted to find a way to amplify it. That is how you find the energy. You can harness that into innovation and say if we have people and they are excited about what they're working on every day… you can take that energy around culture and find fun ways to apply it to engage users."
On she's focused on right now:
"I think that there's a real opportunity to help guide people's daily habits in terms of what content they read. That is something that we are really working on. All of these daily habits--news, sports, games, finance, search, mail, answers, groups--these are all things we have been underinvested in. A little love will go a long way."
On Yahoo's mobile strategy:
"So the nice thing at Yahoo is that we have all of the content that people want on their phone, we have these daily habits. And I think that whenever you're dealing with a daily habit and providing a lot of value around it there is an opportunity not only to provide a lot of value to the end user but to also create a great business."
On how Yahoo will compete if it doesn't have one of the four key distribution technologies:
"It's funny because one of our employees asked that at one of our company meetings. Given that we do not have mobile hardware, a mobile OS, a browser, or a social network, how are we going to compete?...Of the four horseman of the Internet to adopt that analogy, almost all of them are playing in one if not several of those medium. I think that the big piece here is that it really allows us to partner. Yahoo has always been a very friendly company. Our focus, in addition to technology, but also on media, it means there is an opportunity for strong partnerships. That is what we will be focused on. We work with Apple and Google in terms of the operating system. In terms of social network, we have a strong partnership with Facebook. We're able to work with some of these players that have a lot of strength in order to bolster our user experience that we offer on the Yahoo site."
On what some of the successes will be in mobile that will allow it to duplicate the success of search as a money maker:
"I think people already are. For example, the application store, there are a lot of people who sell applications. The big thing is that search is a daily habit. What people do on their phones is often a daily habit. When I thought about the strategy for Yahoo I pulled the list of what people do on their phones in rank order of frequency. If you ignore a few exceptions, things done by carriers--like voice and text, and maps--because I know from my former life it is very expensive and hard to do right--the list looks like e- mail, check the weather, check the news, share photos, get financial quotes, check sports scores, play games. You get the idea. It was funny because I would go and recite that list as the new CEO of Yahoo and I would say, 'What am I doing?' And my family and friends would say--'You are describing Yahoo's business.' I would say, 'No, I'm listing in frequency order what people do on their phones.' The nice thing at Yahoo is that we have all the content that people want on their phones. We have these daily habits. I think whenever you have a daily habit and providing a lot of value around it, there is opportunity to not only provide that value to the end user but to create a great business."
On how long it will take to develop personalization:
"I think it will probably happen in the next three to five years. I think what we have seen happen-- image recognition, voice recognition, translation--these are back on technologies to being able to understand context. Now it is a matter of being able to take personalized notions, things like likes on Facebook, tweets, articles you click on, taking all those signals and mapping those to understand, for example, I like clean energy on Facebook and I tweet out something about green energy, that is in fact the same interest as mine."
On the future of tech:
"Technology isn't stagnant. It's amazing to think about the different waves of internet and technology. You know the first wave really was Yahoo itself, you know the directory, there are these pages out there, how do you organize them. And then the web got so large that the directory model broke down and gave to search. And then the next wave that came was social, and now I think we're on the mobile wave. And so if you think about that, hat's all happened in about 15 years. We've gone through 4 major technology shifts in terms of who the main players really are. And so I think there is always opportunity for new disruption."
On privacy:
"I think that privacy will always be something that users should consider but I also think that privacy is always a trade-off. Because when you give up some of your information you get some functionality in return. So it's really about making those trade-offs in a very informed way. For me the core principles of privacy online are transparency, choice and control."
On whether the interest graph is the kind of technology that will become a key to distribution:
"I definitely think with the web becoming so vast--there is a much content and social context and now with mobile, there is so much location and activity context. How do you pull all that together? The interesting the way you take it is to say ok, we will use some of that information--your personalization, your context, what you've done, all that--to make sense of the content. It is the Internet ordered for you. Which is interesting because it brings Yahoo back to its roots. It used to be that that's what Yahoo was. It took the internet and ordered it up. Now it's so vast that you can't just categorize it anymore. But could we provide a feed information that is ordered, a web ordered for you, and is also available on your mobile phone."
On what excites her in the industry:
"I think that there are so many things. This is a question I like to ask people and the one answer you never want to give is 'oh, I'm very discerning, there is nothing that good out there.' I think there are amazing things you get to see all the time. All kinds of amazing technologies on mobile. When you think about what it means to be location sensitive…Some of these are very basic in terms of things like being able to check in, so there's Foursquare, but if you actually know where people are and where they check in, there are all sorts of sophisticated and interesting thing you can go on to do. So I think there are amazing technologies like that."
On how much she thinks about design:
"I think about it a lot. Apple is the gold standard. Apple's philosophy is that technology and function should cooperate. The amazing thing about tablets, you can flick things and get rid of things, the pinch, the zoom, these are things that are so intuitive, you can see small children begin to use a tablet. There are terrific ideas that proud parents will applaud schilling children before they can even learn to talk -- and know how to turn the page or flick things on iPads -- they know how to turn the page or flick things on iPads. What is powerful but that is that it uses the natural paradigms' that are somewhat in eight to us, and they allow it to be the way that we use technology. That is incredibly powerful. That is overall what you want to have happen, to be able to whittle away technology such that all the complications lie underneath."
On Facebook:
"Facebook provides an amazing platform. And so it will be one of the predominant platforms, if not the predominant platform. But now what happens with social is what you do with it. It's not just about writing down who your friends are, it's about taking that and finding useful content. And telling me 'Hey, you're in Davos right now, you know who else is?' And being able to offer me the opportunity to meet up with someone who I didn't know would be here."
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