Mayer on her first 100 days at Yahoo: 'This job was tailor-made for me'

In her first earnings call since joining Yahoo as CEO, Marissa Mayer didn’t waste any time explaining how her first 100 days have been.

“This job is tailor-made for me,” she said. “The core components of Yahoo’s business — search, mail, ads, mobile, news, and homepage — are also the same components that I’ve built my career upon.”

So, if you ever had any doubt about whether Yahoo was a media company or a tech company, the answer is now pretty crystal clear: Yahoo wants to champion its tech products as the best in the business. Mayer actually answered the question that the past two Yahoo CEOs have fumbled with, which puts her ahead based on that alone. If I were to read between the lines, this means Mayer is going to turn Yahoo into a serious Google competitor.

During the call, Mayer went on to highlight the company’s progress in changing the employee culture, which includes giving everyone personal goals that align with the company, new cell phones, and free food. The list of her own goals for the company began with making sure Yahoo executes faster and gets a return for investors. (And investors seem happy enough, with Yahoo’s stock is up three percent since the Q3 2012 earnings report hit.)

As for the individual pieces, Mayer started with Yahoo’s search business. Right now the company generates a lot of its search revenue through a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing, which it’s been satisfied with. Going forward, however, Yahoo wants to do more to grow search on its own. “There’s more opportunity to integrate search across other areas of our site,” Mayer said.

Some other highlights Mayer mentioned during the call:

• Yahoo’s mobile imprint will continue to grow, with half or more of its workforce focused on mobile in the future.
• Wants to invest more in advertising to focus more on technology rather than using just content.
• She feels Yahoo Answers is an undervalued property and wants to do more with it.
• As for content, there are some elements that are important for Yahoo to own, she said, highlighting original content from the London Olympics as well as user-generated content as found in Yahoo Answers.

Photo Credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat