A new photo sharing app from former Silicon Valley darling Marissa Mayer has been slow to take off — and panned for its bare-bones design — since it was unveiled last week, according to a report.
Mayer, Google’s first-ever female engineer and the former CEO of Yahoo, now runs startup studio Sunshine, which rolled out Shine, an app which is designed to allow users to automatically share photos taken at events they attend together.
The app has managed roughly 1,000 downloads as users slammed its poor design — a product of Mayer’s chaotic management of the engineering team that was assigned to build it, according to a report by the tech newsletter Platformer.
The app was also launched with bugs despite raising $20 million in seed money from investors, including Mayer, whose five-year tenure as chief executive of Yahoo was largely considered a failure.
The Post has sought comment from Mayer.
Mayer reportedly alienated Shine staffers by telling them at a Halloween party at her home that the new app would be modeled largely on the now-defunct Color, a service that collected photos and videos taken by family and friends at the same event and automatically loaded into a gallery that would be available for the group to see.
Once anyone left the party or gathering, that individual would lose access to the Color gallery.
But the Color app failed because strangers who are within the vicinity of the groups would also be able to view the pictures.
Some trolls even took nude photos and uploaded it into the Color app.
The app, which was launched in 2011, folded a year later and its engineering staff was hired by Apple.
But Mayer reportedly thought that Color could provide a template for Shine, according to Platformer.
“We’ll do Color, but we’ll have nudity filters so we’re not Color,” Mayer is quoted as telling her employees at her Halloween party in October.
Shine engineers also noticed bugs in the system, including an inaccurate tracking mechanism that was supposed to monitor users’ location but instead led to photos being inadvertently shared with others.
One Shine employee reportedly learned that photos of their daughter wound up in an album that was shared with colleagues because the Google tracking technology had mistakenly placed them in the vicinity of a group, according to Platformer.
Shine workers also complained about a lack of direction from Mayer, who reportedly alienated them by not heeding their advice and making decisions based solely on her own experiences using the app.
Employees who send questions to Mayer through Slack are often told that she would prefer to answer the questions in person — resulting in delays in the workflow.
Mayer is also frequently late to an all-hands meeting that employees say is scheduled for Fridays at 5 p.m. — resulting in their workload being extended into the weekend, Platformer reported.
Adding to the chaos was the departure earlier this week of Enrique Muñoz Torres, who co-founded Sunshine with Mayer and worked with her at Google and Yahoo.
“Startup life is not easy, but it has been hands down the most rewarding experience in my professional career, which made my decision to leave a very tough one,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
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