That she agreed on Mozilla's change-of-control clause—so Mozilla can just walk away in case of a M&A deal and still get $1B—is simply disconcerting.
I do not have any insights and why she gave in on this point but I know that one of her main skills and responsibilities in her position is to negotiate well and do proper deals. She had to negotiate this change-of-control clause away or to let Mozilla sacrifice on the payout if they walk away. Moreover and considering that Mozilla doesn't have that many financial potential search partner options (Google has been with Chrome rather a competitor for many years now), this should have been possible, I'd assume with my limited knowledge.
I do not like if random forum guys like me are bashing CEOs, I know that this is the toughest job and I don't want to pass judgement on decisions I don't have insights on. But this is really, really weird and Marissa should have known that this bummer will pop up at the next due diligence and create distrust ('are they more time bombs at Yahoo? lets dig deeper') or just reduce the deal value or just increase deal complexity later.
Maybe she didn't think about M&A at that time and she was rather in a fire-and-forget mode but a CEO is always supposed to think about what happens if new shareholders join, about the next due diligence, heck just about the future of the company and eventually, to keep the company always in a proper and clean state and not leaving time bombs for potential successors.
> That she agreed on Mozilla's change-of-control clause—so Mozilla can just walk away in case of a M&A deal and still get $1B—is simply disconcerting.
If you assume the board offered her the position in with the expectation of negotiating a purchase by Google, then the M&A deal costs Mozilla very little -- Google was the previous contract holder, and remains so in many markets.
That she agreed on Mozilla's change-of-control clause—so Mozilla can just walk away in case of a M&A deal and still get $1B—is simply disconcerting.
I do not have any insights and why she gave in on this point but I know that one of her main skills and responsibilities in her position is to negotiate well and do proper deals. She had to negotiate this change-of-control clause away or to let Mozilla sacrifice on the payout if they walk away. Moreover and considering that Mozilla doesn't have that many financial potential search partner options (Google has been with Chrome rather a competitor for many years now), this should have been possible, I'd assume with my limited knowledge.
I do not like if random forum guys like me are bashing CEOs, I know that this is the toughest job and I don't want to pass judgement on decisions I don't have insights on. But this is really, really weird and Marissa should have known that this bummer will pop up at the next due diligence and create distrust ('are they more time bombs at Yahoo? lets dig deeper') or just reduce the deal value or just increase deal complexity later.
Maybe she didn't think about M&A at that time and she was rather in a fire-and-forget mode but a CEO is always supposed to think about what happens if new shareholders join, about the next due diligence, heck just about the future of the company and eventually, to keep the company always in a proper and clean state and not leaving time bombs for potential successors.