Fresh off her $23million severance payment from her former employer Yahoo, ex-CEO Marissa Mayer joked on Wednesday that she’s looking forward to using Gmail again – only to backpedal and endorse Yahoo Mail after she said her remark was taken out of context.
Mayer spoke at a tech conference in London one day after she resigned as CEO at Yahoo following its takeover by Verizon.
The quote about using Gmail – which implied that she was not a fan of the Yahoo email service – was taken out of context, Mayer tweeted on Wednesday.
‘This out-of-context comment was about Gmail’s design and how it has evolved since my work in the early days,’ Mayer tweeted.
‘I will continue to use the excellent Yahoo Mail too,’ she tweeted.
‘The team’s hard work paid off with a dramatically better product.’
The internet giant bid farewell to Mayer, who was at the helm of the company for five years, because Verizon finalized its $4.48billion acquisition on Tuesday.
Now that Mayer was no longer at Yahoo, she joked that she can go back to using to ‘using a tool I designed myself,’ according to Business Insider.
Before she was hired by Yahoo, Mayer spent 13 years working for Google.
She joined the company in 1999 – becoming just the 20th employee ever hired at Google as well as its first female engineer.
Mayer oversaw the layout of Google’s famous search homepage. She also played key roles in developing other signature Google products and features like Google AdWords, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, and Gmail.
She was hired as president and CEO of Yahoo in July 2012.
During her appearance at the Accelerate-Her event in London on Wednesday, Mayer spoke of the difficulties of changing a company’s corporate culture.
Mayer said that rather than focus on changing culture, executives should instead focus on enhancing the best characteristics of a company.
That’s what Mayer said she tried to do at the helm of Yahoo.
Mayer said that her job as CEO at Yahoo was to ‘get out of the way’ and allow the company’s team of engineers to build products and ‘go do things’.
There are few remarks which can be attributed to Mayer because the London event on Wednesday was held under Chatham House Rule, which grants speakers anonymity.
The internal culture at tech companies has come under scrutiny in recent months, particularly at ride-sharing app Uber.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick announced on Tuesday that he was taking a leave of absence after an investigation detailed a ‘bro’ culture that tolerated sexual harassment and a lack of diversity.
The predominantly white-male composition of senior management has also been cited as a major flaw at other tech giants like Twitter, according to BuzzFeed.
Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo, a company that was in protracted decline thanks to more popular rivals like Google and Facebook, was a controversial one, according to The Mercury News.
After taking over in 2012, she went on a buying spree that included a $1billion acquisition of blogging platform Tumblr to reach a younger audience.
She also cut more than a thousand jobs.
A survey released last month by business insights specialty website Owler ranked Mayer as the second most disliked chief executive, behind the head of United Airlines.
Mayer will receive a $23million severance package, according to an earlier filing, as well as $186million in stock options.
‘Given the inherent changes to my role, I’ll be leaving the company,’ Mayer wrote in an email to the company obtained by CNN.
‘However, I want all of you to know that I’m brimming with nostalgia, gratitude and optimism.’
‘Verizon wishes Mayer well in her future endeavors,’ the company said in a statement.
The closing of the deal, announced in July, had been delayed as the companies assessed the fallout from two data breaches that Yahoo disclosed last year.
On Friday, Yahoo will be renamed as Altaba Inc, a holding company whose primary assets will be its 15.5 percent stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and a 35.5 percent holding in Yahoo Japan Corp.
In March, the Justice Department announced that it would charge two Russian intelligence agents and a pair of hired hackers for allegedly orchestrating a devastating criminal breach at Yahoo that affected at least a half billion user accounts.
In a scheme that prosecutors say blended intelligence gathering with old-fashioned financial greed, the four men targeted the email accounts of Russian and US government officials, Russian journalists and employees of financial services and other private businesses, US officials said.
Using in some cases a technique known as ‘spear-phishing’ to dupe Yahoo users into thinking they were receiving legitimate emails, the hackers broke into at least 500 million accounts in search of personal information and financial data such as gift card and credit card numbers, prosecutors said.
Yahoo didn’t disclose the breach until last September when it began notifying hundreds of millions of users that their email addresses, birth dates, answers to security questions and other personal information may have been stolen.
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