Marissa Ann Mayer / b. 1975 / Wisconsin, USA / Businesswoman, Investor, Google Executive, Yahoo! CEO, Founder of Sunshine Contacts and Lumi Labs
Burnout
I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you’re giving up that makes you resentful.
Reported by Matthew Toren in “Marissa Explains It All: 5 Motivating Quotes From Yahoo’s CEO,” entrepreneur.com, July 17, 2014.
Business Philosophy
I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of “Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,” and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough.
Reported by Matthew Toren in “Marissa Explains It All: 5 Motivating Quotes From Yahoo’s CEO,” entrepreneur.com, July 17, 2014.
There are different phases of companies. When you’re in the tens of people, the idea itself either attracts people or it doesn’t. People are there because they think the problem you’re trying to solve is just that important.
Reported by David Gelles in “Marissa Mayer is Still Here,” nytimes.com, April 18, 2018.
I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should.
Reported by Nicholas Carlson in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! (2015).
You know, there’s some people . . . they’re like, “I love it when it’s 10 people or less,” like working in a garage. And there’s some people who are like, “Oh, I just love it when you’re a couple hundred people and you’re starting to hit that inflection point of growth.” And there’s, I mean, who are just like, “Look, if it’s not operating at scale of thousands or tens of thousands of people and doesn’t have, you know, hundreds of millions of users, like, what’s it all for?” And I love every phase of that.
I love it when it’s small and everyone’s [an] individual contributor. I like managing small teams. I like managing large teams. I love the impact and scale of running and being part of a big organization. I love the growth. I even love the challenges.
Interview with Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, “Marissa Mayer on the rise of women technology leaders,” MIT
Technology Review, technologyreview.com, October 3, 2019.
“Cultural DNA”
I think I’ve always thought of culture as DNA. I don’t know a lot about genetics, but I understand some of it and I think that what you really want are the genes that are positive to hyper-express themselves in culture.
Reported by Patricia Sellers in “Transcript: Marissa Mayer at Fortune MPW [Most Powerful Women],” fortune.com, October 17, 2013.
Gender
If you can find something that you’re really passionate about, whether you’re a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force.
Reported by Matthew Toren in “Marissa Explains It All: 5 Motivating Quotes From Yahoo’s CEO,” entrepreneur.com, July 17, 2014.
I was at Google. And if you looked at Tumblr and Yahoo!, you know when you look at a map and you can see the way that South America and Africa used to fit together, I sort of joked that as we got to know Tumblr we were like we kind of felt like those continents, like our users were older, their users were younger.
Reported by Patricia Sellers in “Transcript: Marissa Mayer at Fortune MPW [Most Powerful Women],” fortune.com, October 17, 2013.
Someone even suggested the insane idea that Google should scan all the libraries in the world and put every book ever written online. But no one laughed the idea off. They started to think about how it could be done.
Reported by Nicholas Carlson in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! (2015).
Leadership
I think it’s really important to be authentic and true to yourself in terms of what you think the right thing to do is in a particular moment. I think people respect that type of leadership and while certainly some of those moves might be misunderstood outside, to me, I always have looked at how does the organization respond to those moves?
Interview with Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, “Marissa Mayer on the rise of women technology leaders,” MIT
Technology Review, technologyreview.com, October 3, 2019.
Lumi Labs
We’re a tech incubator in more of the old school train of thought. We’re not an investment firm, so we’re not investing in other people’s startups, or finding teams to invest in. We have a series of ideas that we’d like to explore, applications we’d like to build. Some of them are theses that we could actually base a product line around. And so we’ve worked on hiring very capable engineers who could work on any range of products, and have been staffing them to start to build these products. That said, right now we look much more like a traditional startup because we’re working on our first idea. It’s become fairly well developed and we want to bring it to market.
Interview with Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, “Marissa Mayer on the rise of women technology leaders,” MIT
Technology Review, technologyreview.com, October 3, 2019.
Mayer on Mayer
I didn’t set out to be at the top of technology companies. I’m just geeky and shy and I like to code.
Reported by Jacob Weisberg in “Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer: Hail to the Chief,” vogue.com, August 15, 2013.
It was a very well-rounded childhood, with lots of different opportunities. My mom will say she set out to overstimulate me—surround me with way too many things and let me pick. As a result, I’ve always been a multitasker; I’ve always liked a lot of variety.
Reported by Jacob Weisberg in “Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer: Hail to the Chief,” vogue.com, August 15, 2013.
It was the height of the first boom, so it was 1999. It was a good year to be a graduate in computer science.
Reported by Patricia Sellers in “Transcript: Marissa Mayer at Fortune MPW [Most Powerful Women],” fortune.com, October 17, 2013.
I really like even numbers, and I like heavily divisible numbers. Twelve is my lucky number—I just love how divisible it is. I don’t like odd numbers, and I really don’t like primes. When I turned 37, I put on a strong face, but I was not looking forward to 37. But 37 turned out to be a pretty amazing year. Especially considering that 36 is divisible by twelve!
Reported by Jacob Weisberg in “Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer: Hail to the Chief,” vogue.com, August 15, 2013.
One night I looked up and was like, “Oh, my God, it’s midnight and I have a husband and I’m, like, eight months pregnant. I need to leave!” I was just here working, having the best possible time. When Zack and I were brushing our teeth in the morning, he was like, “Where were you last night?”
Reported by Jacob Weisberg in “Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer: Hail to the Chief,” vogue.com, August 15, 2013.
. . . in 2008, I had gotten engaged. It was a great and fun time in my life. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, Gawker had come to town and had created a blog about us. And there were various characters that made appearances on there. And unfortunately, I was one of them. And it was, you know, it was a caricature of me. It wasn’t me. And, you know, they wrote really awful articles. And I was like, you know, wait, it’s one thing to criticize my product decisions, my career, my business, the arts and leadership. But it’s whole ‘nother to go into the personal realm where. My fiancé wasn’t a public person. And things like that.
Interview with Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, “Marissa Mayer on the rise of women technology leaders,” MIT
Technology Review, technologyreview.com, October 3, 2019.
Silicon Valley
I’ve heard both the founding stories of Google and Yahoo, and for both those companies, the founders didn’t even have to get into a car. They could literally go to the law office, the venture capitalists, the bank . . . on a bike. It’s all that close together.
Reported by Adam Fisher in Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) (2018).
Technology
You can be good at technology and like fashion and art. You can be good at technology and be a jock. You can be good at technology and be a mom. You can do it your way, on your terms.
Reported by Matthew Toren in “Marissa Explains It All: 5 Motivating Quotes From Yahoo’s CEO,” entrepreneur.com, July 17, 2014.
It’s really wonderful to work in an environment with a lot of smart people.
Reported by Matthew Toren in “Marissa Explains It All: 5 Motivating Quotes From Yahoo’s CEO,” entrepreneur.com, July 17, 2014.
. . . when I was starting out, I was an oddity in computer science and women were maybe the minority in computer science. But I was an oddity to the point where, a lot of my schoolmates had been programming since they were 11. You ended up being a programmer if you were a teenage boy, really into video games and science fiction. And I didn’t fit that mold. And I think a lot of those stereotypes, because technology has become so much more pervasive and people now understand the kinds of opportunities and applications that can be built on the Internet I think that people have a much better understanding of how becoming a software engineer has can ultimately have an impact on what you’re doing day to day. And that helps a lot with people entering computer science overall, both men and women.
Interview with Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, “Marissa Mayer on the rise of women technology leaders,” MIT
Technology Review, technologyreview.com, October 3, 2019.
Tumblr
[Founder] David Karp is just incredibly special. I like to think that I’m good at empathy, but I will say that David Karp is just incredibly empathetic and really in tune with the community of people that he has, that are contributing and creating on Tumblr.
Reported by Patricia Sellers in “Transcript: Marissa Mayer at Fortune MPW [Most Powerful Women],” fortune.com, October 17, 2013.
Yahoo!
Now I think we’re on the mobile wave. . . . I think that the big piece here is that it really allows us to partner. Yahoo! has always been a very friendly company.
Reported by Alexis Kleinman in “Marissa Mayer Lays Out Plan To Save Yahoo at Davos,” huffpost.com, January 25, 2013.
“Pay-Pal.” People wrote down “payments.” He said “Google.” People wrote down “search.” He said “eBay” and they wrote “auctions.” After a few more companies, he said “Yahoo!” He collected the thirty pieces of paper on Yahoo! Everybody had a different word. What was Yahoo! trying to be? No one inside the company knew anymore.
Reported by Nicholas Carlson in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! (2015).
[Jerry] Yang believed Microsoft made ugly, bad products. Its besuited culture was so the opposite of Yahoo!’s.
Reported by Nicholas Carlson in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! (2015).
[Scott] Thompson announced that Yahoo! was going to sue Facebook over patent infringement. The move deeply embarrassed both the engineers at Yahoo, who thought that kind of behavior was for trolls, and the media people at Yahoo! who depended on traffic partnerships with Facebook to build audiences.
Reported by Nicholas Carlson in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! (2015).
If Microsoft and Yahoo! didn’t combine, Google was going to own the Internet forever.
Reported by Nicholas Carlson in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! (2015).
. . . it was becoming unwise to send a résumé from an email address with an “@yahoo.com” at the end.
Reported by Nicholas Carlson in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! (2015).
I’m proud of what we achieved at Yahoo! That said, we had a quickly decaying legacy business. All we really managed to do was offset the declines.
Reported by David Gelles in “Marissa Mayer is Still Here,” nytimes.com, April 18, 2018.
One of my key learnings from Yahoo! is that timing is everything. There was a time when Yahoo!’s offerings could consume hours a day, and trying to regain that moment in time was really hard. We could make the products really good, but regaining that contextual relevance that was afforded to Yahoo! in 1999 and the early 2000s was difficult.
Reported by David Gelles in “Marissa Mayer is Still Here,” nytimes.com, April 18, 2018.