Marissa Mayer

Marissa Ann Mayer (born May 30, 1975) is an American business executive and investor who served as president and chief executive officer of Yahoo! from 2012 to 2017.

She was a long-time executive, usability leader and key spokesperson for Google (employee No. 20).

Mayer later co-founded Sunshine, a startup technology company.

After graduating from high school in 1993, Mayer was selected by Tommy Thompson, then the Governor of Wisconsin, as one of the state's two delegates to attend the National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia.

Intending to become a pediatric neurosurgeon, Mayer took pre-med classes at Stanford University.

She later switched her concentration to symbolic systems, a major which combined philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science.

At Stanford, she danced in the university ballet's Nutcracker, was a member of parliamentary debate, volunteered at children's hospitals, and helped bring computer science education to Bermuda's schools.

During her junior year, she taught a class in symbolic systems, with Eric S. Roberts as her supervisor.

The class was so well received by students that Roberts asked Mayer to teach another class over the summer.

Mayer went on to graduate with honors from Stanford with a BS in symbolic systems in 1997, and an MS in computer science in 1999.

For both degrees, her specialization was in artificial intelligence.

For her undergraduate thesis, she built travel-recommendation software that advised users in natural-sounding human language.

She joined Google in 1999 as employee number 20.

She started out writing code and overseeing small teams of engineers, developing and designing Google's search offerings.

She became known for her attention to detail, which helped land her a promotion to product manager, and later she became director of consumer web products.

She oversaw the layout of Google's well-known, unadorned search homepage.

She was also on the three-person team responsible for Google AdWords, which is an advertising platform that allows businesses to show their product to relevant potential customers based on their search terms.

In 2002, Mayer started the Associate Product Manager (APM) program, a Google mentorship initiative to recruit new talents and cultivate them for leadership roles.

Each year, Mayer selected a number of junior employees for the two-year program, where they took on extracurricular assignments and intensive evening classes.

Notable graduates of the program include Bret Taylor and Justin Rosenstein.

In 2009, the Illinois Institute of Technology granted Mayer an honoris causa doctorate degree in recognition of her work in the field of search.

Mayer interned at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, and Ubilab, UBS's research lab based in Zurich, Switzerland.

She holds several patents in artificial intelligence and interface design.

After graduating from Stanford, Mayer received 14 job offers, including a teaching job at Carnegie Mellon University and a consulting job at McKinsey & Company.

AdWords helped deliver 96% of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2011.

In January 2017, Yahoo!

announced that Mayer would end her employment by that company and would resign from its board of directors following the sale of the company's operating business to Verizon Communications for $4.48 billion.

She did not join the newly combined company, now called Yahoo Inc. (formerly Verizon Media and prior to that Oath), and she announced her resignation on June 13, 2017.

Mayer was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, the daughter of Margaret Mayer, an art teacher of Finnish descent, and Michael Mayer, an environmental engineer who worked for water companies.

Her grandfather, Clem Mayer, had polio when he was seven and served as mayor of Jackson, Wisconsin, for 32 years.

She has a younger brother.

She would later describe herself as having been "painfully shy" as a child and teenager.

She "never had fewer than one after-school activity per day," participating in ballet, ice-skating, piano, swimming, debates, and the Brownies.

During middle school and high school, she took piano and ballet lessons, the latter of which taught her "criticism and discipline, poise, and confidence".

At an early age, she showed an interest in mathematics and science.

When she was attending Wausau West High School, Mayer was on the curling team and the precision dance team.

She excelled in chemistry, calculus, biology, and physics.

She took part in extracurricular activities, becoming president of her high school's Spanish club, treasurer of the Key Club, captain of the debate team, and captain of the pom-pom squad.

Her high school debate team won the Wisconsin state championship and the pom-pom squad was the state runner-up.

During high school, she worked as a grocery clerk.