How To Make $1 Million In Three Years Working For A Failing Company

Twitter/@MarissamayerA startup called Stamped was Mayer's first acqui-hire.

When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer joined the company in 2012, she was shocked to learn that the company had less than 100 people working on mobile development.

She came up with a strategy to quickly fix the problem: buy lots and lots of failed startups and on-board their engineering teams. These types of deals are called "acqui-hires."

It was a quick and effective way for Yahoo to add hundreds of mobile developers to its ranks.

It's also an expensive method. 

When I was doing reporting for my new book, "Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!," several sources told me that the standard deal engineers from acqui-hired companies get when they join Yahoo is approximately $1 million over three years. 

This level of compensation sometimes irked other Yahoo employees - especially those who missed out on raises because Mayer instituted a tough stack-ranking system in order to manage Yahoo's costs and weed-out underperformers.

There are a lot more details like that in my book, which you can order on Amazon.