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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

Today I'm talking with Nicholas Carlson, author of the new book, Marissa Meyer and the

Fight to Save Yahoo.

Nicholas, thank you so much for talking with us today.

It is my pleasure to be here.

People really love to talk about the CEO,

and I mean I know that any time we put her in a headline on HPR.org that post is going to get read and clicked on

What do you think is the source of this fascination we have with her?

I think it's for a number of reasons. I think you could start with the fact that she's 39 years old and she's made

seven hundred million dollars that's sort of a remarkable seat there's the fact that she was

an early Googler she left Stanford and went to Google as a

Coder as employee number 20 to 25 somewhere in there and you know that shows she sort of has

the Google aura about her that's what I think about and then there's the fact about and it's just totally undeniable

but the fact that she's a very powerful and rich and wealthy woman in an

industry where there are not that many women and certainly not that many

running big public companies and so there's that fact I mean so she's

young she's rich and also she's more photogenic than your average tech CEO and I

think that has a lot to do with people cooking on stories about her.

...