Haute 100 SF: How Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer Influenced Polyvore’s CEO

In hopes to continue to revive the site as well as increase advertisement revenue, Yahoo has completed its acquisition of the fashion forward e-commerce site Polyvore.

As stated in the press release, the acquisition will enhance Yahoo’s digital magazines and verticals by merging community and commerce. Additionally, both sites will produce native shopping ads to help drive traffic and sales to retailers.

“Polyvore has built an excellent team, a category leading product, and a strong business based on a highly engaged community,” said Simon Khalaf, Yahoo’s SVP of Publisher Products. “The combination of Yahoo’s industry-leading digital content with Polyvore’s expertise in community and commerce has outstanding potential. We are thrilled to have the Polyvore team join us.”

“I’m delighted to join Yahoo. Our core mission of empowering people to feel good about their style will remain the same, but with Yahoo’s help we’ll be able to make Polyvore even bigger and better for our user community,” said Jess Lee, Co-Founder and CEO, Polyvore. “I’m also excited that we’ll be able to deliver more scale to our advertisers by integrating our ad offerings into Yahoo Gemini.”

In an interview with Business Insider, Lee revealed the great piece of advice Mayer gave her.

She said, “I straight up told Marissa [Mayer] ‘I don’t know if I want this job.’ And she [Mayer] said, ‘Let me give you some career advice.’ And then she told me that you should always take the more challenging path. When you have different options, you should choose the thing that looks like it will be more difficult, because that usually turns out to be the right choice.’”

At the time Mayer, who was at Google, was interviewing Lee for Google’s APM program.

While at Google, Lee was offered the CEO position at Polyvore after sending a letter of complaints on what the site should improve.

When Lee was contemplating taking the position she remembered Mayer’s advice. She told BI, “When I was thinking about joining Polyvore, I was wondering, ‘Should I leave Google’s warm embrace to go to this crazy, tiny little startup that no one’s ever heard of?’ I felt like, That’s going to be really challenging. I should do that.’”

Photo via Wikimedia Commons