Marissa Mayer

Primary Company/Organization: Google; Yahoo!; Sunshine

Introduction

Marissa Mayer is one of the internet world's most prominent female executives and has attracted considerable attention as the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company (Yahoo!) who did not found the company. By June 2012, when she began her tenure at Yahoo!, she was best known for her thirteen years with Google, during which she worked as a product manager, engineer, and designer for a range of services, including Gmail, Google Books, and Google Maps. Her competence and vision enabled her to rise through the ranks to an executive position at Google, and she demonstrated her potential for further growth when, at the age of thirty-seven and pregnant, she struck a blow for women in technology (and in the corporate world generally) by taking the top spot as chief executive officer (CEO) and president of Yahoo! between 2012 and 2017. She cofounded Lumi Labs (now Sunshine), a builder of consumer artificial intelligence applications, in 2018.

Early Life

Marissa Mayer was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, on May 30, 1975, to a mother who was an art teacher and an engineer father. She cultivated both the artistic and analytical aspects of her personality and, at school, was captain of the debate club and the pom-pom team. She also had a job as a grocery clerk. Her intellectual prowess was recognized and celebrated as well.

Mayer enrolled at Stanford University in California at a time when the Silicon Valley cluster of intellectuals, investors, and engineers was beginning to form. She received degrees in symbolic systems and then computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence. She had the opportunity to work as a consultant before taking the chance to join Google, where she was employee number twenty, the first female engineer at the company.

Life's Work

Mayer's work with Google provided the foundation for her career, and what she learned during more than a decade with the internet behemoth would be instrumental in determining her later success at Yahoo! Mayer filled a range of roles for Google, moving from engineer to headhunter, product designer, project manager, and often the human face of the company. In an industry in which many of the enormously successful and rich founders and entrepreneurs struggle to make a favorable impression in mass media, Mayer stood out as the attractive, human, youthful, and successful face of the company. Both she and Google used her presence—she was named among the private sector's most glamorous as well as most influential people—to their benefit.

However, Mayer is also a formidable computer scientist in her own right. Although she has patent applications in the area of artificial intelligence, it seems that her greatest achievement in career terms was to be able to relate to Google users and their use of the services provided. The term google has become a household word around the globe, in no small part thanks to her design of the uncluttered search page and the user experience that it provides. Mayer has likened the Google experience to the elegance of a Swiss army knife, which combines many tools for specific tasks but which manages to tuck them all away, inconspicuously, until the user chooses to pull them out and make use of them. In her influential slide show “The Nine Notions on Innovation,” Mayer identifies the secret to this success as the desire to think of users and usage, not money. She also mentions an effective if small and often overlooked concept: Google regularly releases incremental changes in service in the form of beta releases, which facilitate development of the most up-to-date technological approaches to using the internet by allowing the public to test these enhancements and suggest improvements.

Mayer also continued to oversee the human resources of the company until her departure in mid-2012 and was said to scrutinize every hiring decision made at Google, a company of some six thousand employees. Her expressed preference is for “brilliance” and, indeed, the more brilliance the better. The level of work this would require helps to explain the punishing work schedule to which Mayer subjected herself. At the time she left Google she was believed to be worth some $300 million, reflecting the value she gave to the company.

In addition to the basic search engine, Google has diversified its processes and services through acquisition and invention. Mayer was involved with the invention side of this development. She was associated with Google Maps, Google Books, Google Images, and Gmail, both from the programming standpoint and (as her job title, Vice President of Search and User Experience, suggested) from the human perspective. Google's philosophy of not doing evil and of “being cool” has been reinforced by the ability to provide unfussy and sleekly functional service interfaces. These services have not all been without controversy, however. Google's attempt to digitize all the books in the world, for example, and make them available free of charge to anyone with Internet access led to a significant legal struggle concerning the ownership (and revenue streams) of the intellectual property involved. Google Maps and Google Earth, meanwhile, which seek to create and update an accurate interactive image of every part of the world at a variety of scales, have also been controversial in terms of privacy and secrecy issues.

Another stream of complaint has turned on what Google actually intends to do with all the information it has gathered on its millions of users and whether the company is guilty of the further commodification of knowledge and of space—that is, turning information such as knowledge about neighborhoods into products that can be marketed and sold even though they are derived from private property rather than being part of the public domain or commons. Commodification of Google customers (that is, as consumption units for advertising) has also been discussed.

On July 17, 2012, Mayer started work as the president and CEO of Yahoo! after a surprising and secretive switch from Google. The move was particularly unexpected because she was six months pregnant at the time—she promised to work through a brief maternity leave—and because of the turmoil at Yahoo!, which had thereby appointed its fifth CEO in as many years and appeared to have left its best days some time in the past. The company, which had been a major player in the early days of the internet, had lost much of its drive as other companies—including Google—rose to prominence. As the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company who had not founded the company, Mayer faced intense scrutiny as she began her new job.

Mayer soon began instituting changes at Yahoo!, both in terms of human resources policies and efforts to turn around the company's fortunes. She developed an online platform for employees to register complaints and get issues fixed by management, a strategy that was credited with improving morale at the company and contributing to a significant rise in its stock price. She also increased maternity leave and paid time off for new fathers. However, other initiatives were more controversial, including Mayer's ban on telecommuting. Under her leadership, Yahoo! acquired many startup companies, including the high-profile purchase of the social media site Tumblr, but the attempted turnaround met with mixed results. By September 2013 Yahoo!'s stock price had doubled and profits increased, but revenues were down and shares remained volatile. In late 2014 Mayer faced significant criticism from some industry analysts, including allegations that her strategy had failed and Yahoo!'s core business was underperforming. Much of this debate was tied to the company's extremely valuable stake in Alibaba, a Chinese internet company that went public in September 2014. Hopeful plans to turn the Alibaba stake into an independent company were scrapped.

Despite her best efforts, Mayer, while gaining a top position, was not able to prevent the further decline of the struggling Yahoo!. Sites such as Google and Facebook had provided too much competition in the fields of social media, search, and video for too many years. Therefore, by 2016, rumors had spread that the company would soon no longer be able to remain independent. By the summer of 2016, it had been officially announced that the company's board had decided to sell its core internet operations and land holdings to Verizon Communications for $4.8 million. The sale was completed in June 2017 and, as expected, Mayer resigned as Yahoo! CEO, leaving with a compensation package worth an estimated $260 million in cash and equity.

In 2018 Mayer cofounded Palo Alto tech startup Lumi Labs with Enrique Muñoz Torres, a former senior vice president of search and advertising at Yahoo and product manager at Google. According to the company's website, Lumi is "focused on building consumer applications enabled by artificial intelligence." The company was renamed Sunshine in 2020. That year it released an address book app that uses artificial intelligence to help users organize and update contacts.

Personal Life

In 2009, Mayer married Zachary “Zack” Bogue, an entrepreneur, investor, and cofounder of Founders Den, which is a shared club space for entrepreneurs. The couple was expecting their first child in the fall of 2012. Mayer's move to Yahoo! was accompanied by claims that she would work through the end of her pregnancy and her child's early days insofar as possible. This approach was considered controversial because, as a prominent woman executive, all of her acts were considered representative of the state of women and feminism, irrespective of her own desires, and most feminists seek parity in the workplace regardless of their biological roles, which above all includes accommodations for their roles as mothers. After the birth of her son on September 30, 2012, Mayer turned to social media to crowdsource baby name suggestions; eventually, however, she settled on a name she had previously considered, Macallister. Mayer and Bogue also have twin daughters, Marielle and Sylvana, who were born in December 2015.

Mayer became known for her intense diligence: for example, by treating her weekends as the opportunity for fourteen-hour-long e-mail sessions. Her workdays often lasted until 9:00 P.M. (at times, midnight), and in the past she allowed herself only five hours' sleep per night. In September 2013 Mayer posed for the fashion magazine Vogue, sparking additional controversy over her image and influence.

Mayer's sense of determination and ambition is complemented by an interest in artistic expression (she became a member of the San Francisco and New York ballet companies' boards as well as that of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and designer clothes. She was once a dancer herself and has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak, and has snorkeled around the world. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her family.

Bibliography

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