Marissa Mayer - Story of Life

The fascinating story of Marissa Mayer begins when she was born in 1975 in Wausau, Wisconsin, to engineer Michael Mayer and Art Teacher Margaret. She described herself as painfully shy as a child and participated in after school programs such as piano, swimming, curling, ice-skating, ballet, Brownies, and even debate team captain.

Excelling in chemistry, biology, physics, and calculus, she initially had the interest to pursue a career in pediatric neuroscience hoping to become a pediatric neurosurgeon which encouraged her to enroll in pre-med classes at Stanford University but later switched to Symbolic Systems to major in a combination of philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science.

Under the supervision of American Scientist Eric Roberts, she was assigned to teach a class during her junior year, as it was well-received by the class Eric Roberts encouraged her to teach another one. Before Stanford University, she applied to 10 various schools including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, and was accepted into all of them.

In 1997 she graduated with honors awarded a BS in symbolic systems in 1997 and in 1999 an MS in computer science, receiving various job offers. She was honored with a doctorate degree by the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2009. Marissa Mayer’s interests in computer science are centered around artificial intelligence.

Despite the number of jobs offers she received from reputable firms, she opted to join Google than in its early years in 1999 as employee 20 and the firm’s first female engineer, starting out as a programmer her first two years with Google and went on to become a key player in the company’s three-person team which established Google AdWords which in 2011 was responsible for 96% of the company's revenue, Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle, and Gmail.

She will also go on to establish a program which recruits talented persons and mentors them to assume leadership roles each year, it was called the Associate Product Manager program started in 2002, eventually becoming Vice President of Search Products and User Experience in 2005.

With Yahoo! numbers going low behind Google and several top management changes including Marissa Mayer being appointed President and CEO of the firm in 2012. During her tenure as President and CEO, she launched PB&J, an online management program that collects and investigates employee complaints. During her time at Yahoo! She was credited for some of Yahoo's product designs, a drastic improvement, and bringing traffic to its core apps.

Marissa Mayer has been honored various times for her efforts, in 2014 she was ranked 6th on Fortune’s 40 under 40 lists, 16th most-powerful businesswoman in the world according to a 2014 Fortune’s article, Forbes Magazine’s ‘World’s 100 Most Powerful Women (2012 - 2014) and became the first Fortune 500 company CEO featured in Vogue Magazine.

When it comes to her personal life, she married investor Zachary Bogue in 2009, a union of which gave them three children named Macallister (boy) and identical twins Sylvana and Marielle. Her net worth according to a 2016 report is an estimated US$500 million.

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