Can Marissa Mayer Save Yahoo?

Marissa Mayer is sitting in URLs, the Yahoo! cafeteria, making the case for the future of a company that almost everyone in Silicon Valley views as doomed. Employees swarm around her, assembling rows of chairs for the afternoon’s FYI, a new weekly ritual where employees get to lob questions at Mayer and her executive team. It’s been a long July, in which Mayer’s one-year anniversary as chief executive officer was marked with an uninspiring second-quarter earnings report. Mayer prefers to focus on the company’s increase in Web traffic. She won’t give numbers but says it’s enough to erase the entire decline from the previous year. “Name another Internet giant that went through three years of decline and then started to grow again,” she says. “It’s a very good sign.”