Marissa Mayer reflects on what went wrong at Yahoo — and shares the compliment she got that she still remembers

• Marissa Mayer recently reflected on Yahoo's struggles and eventual sale to Verizon.
• Mayer said Yahoo was simply too late to embrace the move toward mobile phones.
• She still remembers the compliment Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang gave her as she left the company.

When Marissa Mayer was brought on with high hopes to captain an already struggling Yahoo in 2012, it took five years of trying to revive the internet giant before she ultimately resigned.

In a recent interview with Wired, Mayer said that looking back, "timing is everything" — and that Yahoo was simply too late to embrace the move to mobile phones.

"Yes, taking all those Yahoo products and putting them on mobile was a good idea, but it needed to happen five to eight years earlier than it did," Mayer said.

Despite expectations that Mayer could turn around Yahoo, the company continued to struggle during her tenure. Verizon ultimately bought Yahoo for nearly $5 billion in a deal that was announced in 2016; Mayer stepped down after the deal closed.

Now, as cofounder of tech startup Sunshine, Mayer said she always remembers something she said Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang told her at the end of her tenure: He said Yahoo's product line had "never been in better shape," she said.

"That's a compliment I hold dear," she said. "But it was just too late."

Mayer came to Yahoo from Google in 2012 and had big ideas to change the company, as Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson detailed in his 2015 book, "Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo."

Mayer said in a 2023 interview with The Washington Post that one of her "bigger mistakes" was not taking a "bold enough stance."

"It felt like we were taking a stance in terms of bold acquisition, shifts in the portfolio," she said. "Some of those I would have done to an even more extreme."

Neither Yahoo nor Sunshine responded to a request for comment from Business Insider.