@alexnazaryan
MARISSA MAYER was Google’s 20th employee; Tim Armstrong came about 80 employees later, which in Silicon Valley is a gap of several generations. Mayer was a Stanford-educated engineer; Armstrong was an ad salesman who’d played lacrosse and rowed crew at Connecticut College.
To 99.3 percent of us, those academic and professional differences would be insignificant. Mayer, though, was as acutely aware of status as the protagonist of a Victorian novel. “[Armstrong] did not penetrate Mayer’s ivory-towered product world, and no number of promotions would ever change that,” Sarah Ellison recently wrote in Vanity Fair, noting that “the two regularly faced off in debates” over Google’s future.