Why did you leave Google?

I was 37, and I had been working at Google for 13 years. I had been on search for 10 of those years and just had very recently made the change over to focus on Maps as a search technology. And I was like, “You know, I’m just not sure that I want to be like the 50-year-old search girl.”

I’d always had huge respect for Yahoo as a company. When we were here in this office, we dreamed of maybe getting the Yahoo contract, maybe one day powering Yahoo search. In 1999, Yahoo was the internet. And I knew that while there were a lot of things going wrong for the board and leadership at Yahoo, there were a lot of really good people there working on the products.

What was the best-case scenario for Yahoo when you took over?

Returning it to the pre-eminence in its users’ daily lives, where it used to be people were on Yahoo for half an hour to many hours a day. Could we get back to that type of usage?

I’m proud of what we achieved at Yahoo. That said, we had a quickly decaying legacy business. All we really managed to do was offset the declines.

Yahoo had to deal with some nasty shareholder activist campaigns, and several readers asked about your thoughts on activism. Were there upsides, or was it more of a distraction?

One of the more tragic cases of Yahoo is the Alibaba stake. Both Carl Icahn’s campaign and some of the people who were part of Dan Loeb’s campaign really wanted a commitment to see that stake sold. And Yahoo sold half of that stake in a $35 billion market cap for Alibaba, eroding tens of billions of dollars of upside. So certainly that was not positive. Sometimes that shortsightedness of wanting to get a return quickly can cause you to miss a much bigger gain.

Are there things you wish you would have done differently?

I’m really proud of how well we did. I think over all the team and the company were dealt a very tough hand. We got great results for shareholders, we got great results for advertisers and our users and our employees. And so I feel really good about that, but obviously the absolute home run would have been a stand-alone company and then a complete comeback.