Nicholas Carlson

How an employee secretly recruited a team to fly to Sydney and redesign eBay’s homepage, without the direct signoff of the CEO:

But now, in that cab at the airport, the manic high had for a moment worn off, and Abraham was suddenly facing reality. The reality was his plan had a few problems.

Abraham listed them off in his head. For starters, almost no one at eBay knew what he was up to — including Donahoe himself. It was unclear who was going to pay for the trip. Abraham had gotten the six tickets to Sydney through eBay’s travel service, but technically, he’d never actually gotten approval. As for the rest of the trip’s costs, his plan was to foot the bill and then expense it. Maybe they’d sign off, maybe they wouldn’t.

Then there was the little matter of where he and his team would sleep. There was a possible Airbnb apartment, but no confirmation.

Another exhaustive biography from Nicholas Carlson and Business Insider, this time on Tim Armstrong, his hyperlocal startup Patch and his leadership at AOL:

“He’s a very loyal guy. He made a commitment to different parts of that matrix organization, and damn it, he’s not going to let them down. And even though we brought in McKinsey and they told us to unravel it and Tim bought into it as the right strategy, he couldn’t get himself to do that because it would have been a breach of his personal loyalties.”

This was the first time Armstrong would struggle to make a call that he knew to be the right call because making the decision would force him to hurt lots of people who had believed in something he built from the ground up.

An exhaustive, 22,000-word account of Marissa Mayer’s rise from a focused student in Wausau, Wis. to Yahoo! CEO. Carlson goes back to her childhood to explore the traits that made her so successful at Stanford and Google, and he goes behind the scenes on the Yahoo! board’s decision to choose her over interim CEO Ross Levinsohn:

“Over the weekend, Levinsohn played a guessing game with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. With each of them, Levinsohn and the other Silicon Valley bigwigs ran through a long list of names, trying to figure out who might be getting the job Levinsohn had so hoped for. For each name they came up with, they came up with a persuasive reason why that person could not be it.

“Whom had Wolf and Loeb so clearly already decided on?

“Finally, late Sunday night, Levinsohn got a call from a friend of his at Google.

“This person asked: Had Levinsohn heard that Marissa Mayer had interviewed for the Yahoo job the Wednesday prior?

“Levinsohn realized everything all at once.

“Levinsohn now knew who Yahoo’s next CEO would be.

“Soon, so would everyone else.”

Groupon actually lost $413 million in 2010.

Diving into the S-1, it turned out that Groupon only considered itself profitable because it used a peculiar accounting metric of its own creation — adjusted consolidated segment operating income, or ACSOI.

Basically, Groupon was taking the money it was spending on advertising to acquire new subscribers to its email and not counting that money as a quarterly, recurring expense — but as a one-time, capital expense, the way Google might account for the cost of building a new server farm.

Groupon was saying that ACSOI helped it figure out the ratio between the amount of money it needed to spend on marketing to acquire a subscriber and how much that subscriber would be worth to the company over the long haul.

But marketing expenses are not typically accounted for this way, and people looked at Groupon as though it were trying to pull a fast one.