Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Vodafone CEO Margherita Della Valle is making big moves as a new CEO, a British baroness is behind California’s social media law, and Marissa Mayer is a founder now. The Broadsheet will be off on Monday to observe Juneteenth. Have a great weekend!
– CEO to founder. Marissa Mayer has had a storied career in Silicon Valley, from employee No. 20 at Google to Yahoo CEO. But until recently, she’d never held that other lauded Silicon Valley title: founder.
Mayer has spent the past few years building what is now Sunshine, an A.I.-powered contacts tool. She joined us at a Coins2Day Most Powerful Women dinner in Menlo Park, Calif., this week to talk about that career pivot. Even though she hasn’t herself been a founder before now, she said, she’s spent years surrounded by them.
“My whole career has been based around my interactions with great entrepreneurs,” she told Coins2Day editor-at-large Michal Lev-Ram. “I got to witness and work with the best,” she said, name-checking Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
In her executive roles at Google and Yahoo, she acquired dozens of companies, requiring her to judge what makes a good founder.
So when she landed on the idea that felt right for her, addressing a major product and design problem, she was ready to become a founder herself. She’s bringing her legendary work ethic—weekly all-nighters during her early time at Google—to a new startup with 25 employees, compared to Google and Yahoo’s thousands.
Sunshine’s platform aims to simplify and learn from people’s digital address books. The typical person has 2,000 contacts, 20% of which are usually “stale” with a nonfunctioning phone number or email address, Mayer says. Mayer’s goal is for Sunshine to learn information like which contacts are friends and which are colleagues, or even who’s a colleague who became a friend or a friend who became a colleague. The platform aims to understand which relationships are on the upswing—with increased contact—and which are trailing off. With that information, Sunshine can help people better take advantage of their networks, plan events, and more.
As a startup leader, Mayer says she’s standing by the management principles that guided her Big Tech executive days. Not all of those were popular, like Yahoo’s return-to-office mandate a decade ago. (Sunshine employees also work in the office today.) “I never ask someone to do something I wouldn’t do myself,” Mayer says. “And a lot of those values translate regardless of company size.”
Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet is Coins2Day’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Kinsey Crowley. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Stepping down. Disney CFO Christine McCarthy is taking a family medical leave of absence and stepping down from her role. A 23-year veteran of the company and CFO since 2015, McCarthy helped close Disney's $71 billion acquisition of Fox's entertainment division and advocated for Bob Iger to return as CEO. Iger calls her "a role model for women at every level of business—not just at Disney, but around the world." Coins2Day
- Decisive. Less than two months after being appointed as permanent CEO of Vodafone, Margherita Della Valle is making a big play to regain prominence in the U.K., the company's home market. If allowed by regulators, Vodafone will buy the majority stake in the company behind Three to create the biggest U.K. Mobile network. Bloomberg
- Pride flag down. Several members of the union representing Starbucks workers say they've been told by managers to not decorate for Pride, citing a variety of reasons ranging from lack of staffing to worker safety concerns. In past years, workers were encouraged to decorate stores. Starbucks said it did not issue a corporate ban and any instances of discouragement from management are outliers, not the norm. New York Times
- Comeback. Oracle, led by CEO Safra Catz, is having its best year since 1999, with its share price up 50% since January. The computer software company was previously considered a loser in the cloud market and SAAS boom, but a strategic reset a few years ago has positioned the company to take advantage of the A.I. Frenzy. CNBC
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Amy Wu, the former head of FTX Ventures until FTX's collapse, is joining Menlo Ventures.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Pushing for safety. A British baroness is the architect of California's new law that requires social media companies to build guardrails that prevent children from seeing harmful content. Beeban Kidron is a film director who pushed through U.K.’s Age Appropriate Design Code, and California lawmakers copied the legislation. Politico
- Replicating patterns. Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker warns that A.I. Will exacerbate systemic inequalities. "It’s naturalizing often racist and misogynist determinations about people’s place in the world behind the veil of computational sophistication, in a way that makes it harder and harder to push back against those histories and correct them in the present,” she says. Fast Company
- Henna and the baraat. While India's Supreme Court debates legalizing same-sex marriage, LGBTQ couples are breaking into traditional, elaborate union celebrations. The wedding industry in India brings in $210 billion in revenue every year, and wedding vendors say that it is starting to expand to same-sex couples. Bloomberg
ON MY RADAR
Mayor London Breed discusses San Francisco’s woes and what lies ahead New York Times
What’s behind Black women’s excessive rate of fibroids? Vox
Coding needs to get beyond the gender binary Time
Closing the gender pay gap requires teeth, not just transparency Bloomberg
PARTING WORDS
“If you want to get something done, give it to a busy woman."
—Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
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