Marissa Mayer had a small-town childhood in Wausau, Wisconsin where she demonstrated an early affinity for math and science. She attended Stanford University where she studied computer science and cognitive psychology. After graduating, she worked at research labs in Zurich and California before joining Google in 1999 as employee number 20. At Google, she led many successful projects including the launches of Gmail, Google Maps, and Google News. In 2012, she became CEO of Yahoo with the goal of restoring the company's profitability and morale.

1. MARISSA MAYER

2. EARLY LIFE
• Marissa Ann Mayer is the first child and only
daughter of Michael and Margaret Mayer; the
couple also have a son, Mason, born four years
after his sister. Her father was an environmental
engineer who worked for water-treatment plants
and her mother was an art teacher and stay-at-
home mom who decorated their Wausau home
with Marimekko prints -- a Finnish company known
for its brightly colored designs against a clean
white background. This design esthetic influenced
Mayer's own choices for Google's user interface
years later.
• Born in Wausau, Wisconsin, on May 30, 1975, Marissa Mayer has described
her early years as a small-town childhood, complete with ballet lessons, ice
skating, Brownies and debate team competitions. The daughter of an engineer and
an art teacher, Mayer demonstrated an early affinity for math and science. While at
Wausau West High, she worked at a local grocery store, where she memorized the
prices for hundreds of items in order to streamline the checkout process.

3. Laura Beckman Anecdote
• Mayer frequently mentions a valuable life
lesson she learned from Laura Beckman,
the daughter of her piano teacher and a
talented volleyball player. In an interview with
the Los Angeles Times, Mayer explained:
"She was given the choice of joining the
varsity team...[and] sit on the bench for the
year, or junior varsity, where she would start
every game. Laura shocked everyone and
chose varsity. The next year she came back
as a senior, made varsity again and was
a starter. The rest of the players who had
been on junior varsity were benched for their
entire senior year. I asked Laura: 'How did you know to pick varsity?' Laura told
me: 'I just knew if I got to practice and play alongside the best players every day, it
would make me better. And that's exactly what happened.'"

4. High School:
Mayer was president of the Spanish
Club, treasurer of the Key Club, and
involved in debate, Math Club,
academic decathlon and Junior
Achievement (where she sold fire
starters.) at Wausau West High
School. She also played the piano,
took babysitting lessons, and
continued to dance; her years of
classical ballet training helped her earn a
place on the precision dance team. Her debate team won the state championship her
senior year which helped her hone her skill of identifying problems and solutions
quickly.She credits her work ethic to a job as a supermarket cashier where she
memorized produce codes in order to check out items as fast as employees who'd been
there 20 years. Her highly competitive nature was apparent in her interview with the LA
Times: "The more numbers you could memorize, the better off you are. If you had to
stop to look up a price in a book, it totally killed your average." While experienced
cashiers averaged 40 items per minute, Mayer held her own, averaging between 38-41
items per minute

5. College and Graduate School:
• As a high school senior, Mayer was accepted to all ten colleges she applied to,
eventually turning down Yale to attend Stanford. She entered college thinking she'd
be a pediatric neurosurgeon, but a required computer course for pre-med students
intrigued and challenged her. She decided to study Symbolic Systems which
included courses in cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics and computer
science.
• While at Stanford she danced in "The Nutcracker" ballet, engaged in
parliamentary debate, volunteered at a children's hospital, was involved in bringing
computer science education to schools in Bermuda and began teaching her junior
year. She continued on at Stanford for graduate school where friends recall she
pulled all-nighters and often appeared in the same clothes she wore the day
before.

6. Early Career Path:
• Mayer served at the UBS research lab in Zurich, Switzerland for nine months
and at SRI International in Menlo Park prior to joining Google.

7. Interview with Google
•Mayer's initial introduction to Google was decidedly inauspicious. A graduate student
in a long-distance relationship, she recalls "pathetically eating a bad bowl of pasta in
my dorm room by myself on a Friday night" when a recruiting email arrived from a tiny
search engine company. "I remember I’d told myself, 'New emails from recruiters —
just hit delete.'" But she didn't because she'd heard about the company from one of
her professors and her own graduate studies focused on the same areas the company
wanted to explore. Although she'd already received job offers Oracle, Carnegie Mellon
and McKinsey, she interviewed with Google. At that time, Google only had seven
employees and all the engineers were male. Realizing that a better gender balance
would make for a stronger company, Google was eager for her to join the team but
Mayer didn't immediately accept.

8. • Over spring break, she analyzed the most successful choices she'd made in her
life to see what they had in common. Decisions about where to go to college, what
to major in, how to spend summers all seemed to revolve around the same two
concerns: "One was, in each case, I’d chosen the scenario where I got to work with
the smartest people I could find....And the other thing was I always did something
that I was a little not ready to do. In each of those cases, I felt a little overwhelmed
by the option. I’d gotten myself in a little over my head."

9. Career at Google:
• She accepted the offer and joined Google in June 1999 as he 20th employee hired
by Google and its first female engineer. She went on to establish the look of Google's
interface as a search engine and oversee the development, code-writing, and launch
of Gmail, Google Maps, iGoogle, Google Chrome, Google Health, and Google News.
She heavily influenced the company's biggest successes such as Google Earth,
Books, Images and more, and she curated Google Doodle, the morphing of the
familiar homepage logo into designs and images celebrating special events around the
world. Named a Vice President in 2005, Mayer's most recent role had her supervising
the company's mapping products, location services, Google Local, Street View and
many other products.

10. • During her 13-year tenure she led the product management effort for
more than a decade during which Google Search grew from a few hundred
thousand to over a billion searches per day.
Several patents in artificial intelligence and interface design carry her name
as inventor. She has been very vocal in her support of smart product
design, intense corporate teamwork and girl power.

11. Move to Yahoo
She assumed the reins at Yahoo as CEO on July 17, 2012, where she faces
a tough battle to restore morale, confidence and profitability. Mayer is the
company's third CEO in a year.
(1995–2001) (2001–2007) (2007–2009) (2009–2011)

12. Personal:
Mayer dated current Google CEO Larry Page for three years. She began seeing
internet investor Zach Bogue in January 2008 and they married in December 2009;
the couple are expecting a baby boy October 7, 2012. She owns a $5 million luxury
penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco and later purchased a Palo
Alto Craftsman home, but not before looking at more than 100 properties. An
aficionado of fashion and design, she is one of Oscar de la Renta's top customers
and once paid $60,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with him.Mayer is an art
collector and commissioned preeminent glass artist Dale Chihuly to create a 400-
piece ceiling installation featuring blown glass sea flora and fauna. She also owns
original art by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Sol LeWitt.
With Larry Page
Married to Zach Bogue

13. A cupcake aficionado, she's been known to study cupcake cookbooks, create
spreadsheets of ingredients, and test versions of her own before writing new
recipes. "I’ve always loved baking," she once told an interviewer. "I think it’s
because I’m very scientific. The best cooks are chemists.'
She describes herself as "really physically active" and told the NYTimes that
she's run the San Francisco half marathon, the Portland Marathon, and plans
on doing the Birkebeiner, North America's longest cross country ski race. She's
also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.
She regards her ability to anticipate trends as one of her assets: "Back in about
2003, I correctly called cupcakes as a major trend. It was a business prediction,
but it's been widely interpreted as [that] I just like them."
Other frequently-mentioned details about Mayer include her love of Mountain
Dew and how little sleep she requires -- only 4 hours a night.

14. Awards and Honors
•Matrix Award by the New York Women in Communications
•Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum
•"Woman of the Year" by Glamour magazine
•Named one of Fortune's 50 Most Powerful Women in Business at age 33 making her
the youngest woman ever to be included
Board Membership
•San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
•San Francisco Ballet
•New York City Ballet
•Wal-Mart Stores