Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Exclusive: Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer Officially Joins Jawbone Board

As I had reported last fall that she might, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has officially joined the board of Jawbone, the high-profile wireless gadget maker whose nifty products include Jawbone wireless headsets, Jambox speakers and the Up personal fitness wristbands, according to sources at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Mayer has already attended a board meeting of the San Francisco-based startup, added those sources. She had been talking to Jawbone about becoming a director since before she became the top exec at Yahoo.

As I have previously written, it is a good fit.

The former Google exec is well known for her product chops and also her deep interest in tony aesthetics and high-level design — qualities that Jawbone is well known for. And the addition of Mayer to the board of Jawbone will add someone with experience in scaling businesses from small to large, as well as deeper technical expertise.

She has been an active angel investor in start-ups, and currently is on the board of Walmart Stores and several cultural institutions in San Francisco and New York.

Jawbone has a lot of funding, having raised about $210 million from such venture firms as Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, as well as Deutsche Telekom, investor Yuri Milner and others.

Interestingly, Mayer and Jawbone CEO and founder Hosain Rahman attended Stanford University at the same time.

I have emails into Yahoo and Jawbone, and await comment.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald