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Marissa Mayer, President/CEO Yahoo
Yahoo
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Marissa Mayer


President/CEO, Yahoo


Age:
Years as a CEO:
Tenure: 0
Industry: Software & Technology



Member Endorsements:

Endorsement list
  • Leading under extreme pressure - 2
  • Change Management - 1
  • Unify the business - 2
  • Driving efficiency gains - 1
  • Inspirational - 1
  • Leading in fellowship - 1
  • Strategic clarity - 1
Endorsement comments

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CEO DOSSIER

Marissa spent 13 years working at Google and was responsible for its look as well as many key features. She caused a stir when she jumped ship to rival Yahoo while pregnant with her first child. Will her skills and experience be enough to turn round the troubled company?

early years
Marissa was born in 1975 in Wisconsin, where her parents worked as an engineer and an art teacher, giving her an interest in both engineering and art. She originally wanted to become a doctor before changing her mind and developing a passion for computers.
Marissa graduated from Stanford with degree in symbolic systems in 1997 and a master’s degree in computer science in 1999. She received 14 job offers when she left university but she chose to join the start-up company Google as its 20th employee and first female software engineer. When she first worked for the search engine she was writing code and overseeing small teams of engineers before going on to use her sense of style and colour to develop and design features. After two years as a software engineer, Marissa was promoted to the role of product manager in July 2001, before becoming director of consumer web services in March 2003.

In November 2005 she was promoted to vice president for search products and user experience at Google. In this role she approved almost every feature and design on the search engine from the words to the colours. Products she has been responsible for introducing include Google News, Gmail and Image Search. She oversaw 200 product managers, who themselves supervised 3,000 engineers. In 2006 she told Fortune that she worked 11 hours a day and attended 70 meetings a week, saying: “I pace myself by taking a week-long vacation every four months." 

In October 2010 Marissa was given a new role at Google as vice president of location and local services.

At the age of 37, Marissa became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company when she took the helm at Google’s rival Yahoo! in July 2012. At the time of her appointment she was six months pregnant with a baby boy due in October 2012.


As ceo
When Marissa first became CEO at Yahoo, the company was going through a troubled period and had been through four CEOs in five years. Her task as its new leader was to try and rebuild its reputation, motivate the company’s dwindling workforce, raise its stock price and bring new ideas and innovation to the table.

She immediately set to work giving Yahoo a major overhaul, redesigning its Mail and Flickr services to reflect the major increase in mobile users. She said she wanted to come up with a coherent mobile strategy and get half of Yahoo’s technical workforce working on mobile products.  In her first six months the value of shares climbed 30% and she appeared to have halted Yahoo’s decline. In the final quarter of 2012 she led a buyback of $1.5 billion in Yahoo shares.

In March 2013 she led the acquisition of the news summarization service Summly for $30 million, before rolling out an update to Yahoo’s mobile news app the following month, which included its technology.

Marissa’s strategy is to acquire new technology to add to the services Yahoo offers to increase its appeal to users. Other acquisitions have included mobile app developers Stamped and OnTheAir. And she has also set about trying to recruit talented staff to join the company, including finance chief Ken Goldman.

In April 2013 Marissa caused controversy when she stopped Yahoo employees being able to work from home. She defended her decision in her closing keynote speech at the Great Place to Work conference by saying: “It’s not what’s right for Yahoo right now.”
She said: “People are more productive when they're alone but they're more collaborative and innovative when they're together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

Marissa has described her first months as Yahoo CEO as a “series of sprints”. She has been determined to improve the work culture at Yahoo, trying to raise morale among employees and make it somewhere people want to work. Another priority is making improvements to Yahoo’s products.

She said: “Getting the company growing at the rate we like will take several years. Our long-term success will be a series of sprints — we’re nearing the end of our first sprint.”

Away from work
Marissa is known for using her organisational skills at home as well as in the workplace. For example she has used spreadsheets to find the perfect cupcake recipe and plan her wedding. She enjoys throwing and attending parties and is passionate about fashion, once paying $60,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with Oscar de la Renta. 

She is married with a son and is very physically active, enjoying long-distance running and skiing.

In own words
"I helped build Google, but I don't like to rest on [my] laurels. I think the most interesting thing is what happens next."

“I refuse to be stereotyped. I think it’s very comforting for people to put me in a box. ‘Oh, she’s a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.’”

Leadership and philosophy
Marissa is a charismatic leader but she is also highly organised and a stickler for detail.
A New York Times article written during her time at Google said:
“In meetings with subordinates, Ms. Mayer comes across as a zealous copy editor or meticulous art teacher correcting first-semester students. With so many new recruits, she reasons, someone has to teach them how Google does things.”

And Marissa uses charts, graphs and quantitative analysis to help her make decisions and evaluate people. She is known for her tenacity and curiosity and often describes herself as a geek. She said:
“Geeks are people who love something so much that all the details matter."

She is not afraid of failure but she does not believe in wasting time on bad ideas. She told the audience at the 2011 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit that she had only thought Google had a 2% chance of success but took a risk and joined the company anyway. She said:
“It’s totally fine to fail, you just have to fail fast.”

Her tips for success are to show up, surround yourself with the smartest people and do something you’re not quite ready to do.

Our Three Questions
1. How challenging was it to take on a CEO position while pregnant with your first child and how did you manage to balance becoming a mother with your new job?

2. Do you think that your edict that staff should be “physically present” should apply to other companies as well, or was it something very specific to Yahoo and its particular circumstances?

3. Does Yahoo have any future left as a distinct brand, or is it just a shell for the various companies that it has acquired?

Colleagues, Friends & Analysts' report
Matt Rabinowitz, a close friend who has known Marissa since their days on the Stanford debate team in the early 1990s, said:
“Her quirkiness aligned beautifully with this moment in history when Google took over the Internet.”

Marissa’s former boss at Google, Jonathan Rosenberg, said:
“She is a catalyst for winning ideas. Marissa has been through the evolution of the Google playbook. She is part author. That is very important because she understands the design aesthetic of Google.”

Date Written
24-04-2013
Sources
Wall Street Journal
Payscale.com
New York Times
Bloomberg Businessweek
Fortune
Biography.com
About.com
NDTV Gadgets
Wall Street Journal
Payscale.com
New York Times
Bloomberg Businessweek
Fortune
Biography.com
About.com
NDTV Gadgets
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Financials
Business summary
Employees: 11,700

Yahoo! Inc., a technology company, provides search, content, and communication tools on the Web and on mobile devices worldwide. It operates Yahoo.com that offers Yahoo! Search, which provides users with a free search capability; Yahoo! News that provides news via text, photos, and video; and Yahoo! Sports, which offers fantasy sports, editorial reporting, real-time scores, statistics and breaking news, and global sports events and premium college sports coverage. The company’s Yahoo.com also provides Yahoo! Finance that offers a set of financial data, information, and tools for users to make financial decisions; Yahoo! Entertainment and Lifestyles, which is a collection of properties focused on trends and information in culture, women’s issues, and media; Yahoo! Video that provides news, finance, sports, entertainment, and lifestyle video content; and Yahoo! Toolbar, a Web browser add-on. It also provides communications tools, including Yahoo! Mail that provides users with e-mail, instant messaging, and mobile text messaging, as well as integrated contacts and calendar functionality; and Yahoo! Messenger, an instant messaging service. In addition, the company offers mobile and emerging products, including IntoNow from Yahoo! for watching TV; and Yahoo! Connected TV, a software platform that provides interactive television, as well as provides user-generated content products, such as Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, and Flickr that allow users to create, share, and discover ideas, interests, and photography. Further, it offers a range of marketing services, such as display advertising, search advertising, listing-based services, and commerce-based transactions to advertisers; and APIs, such as Yahoo! Developer Network, Cocktails, Yahoo! Query Language, Yahoo! User Interface, Search BOSS, and Yahoo! Flickr API for third-party developers, advertisers, agencies, publishers, and designers. The company was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

Data supplied by Yahoo! Finance.
Click here for more detailed financial information on Yahoo from Yahoo!
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