Marissa Mayer

Marissa Ann Mayer (; born May 30, 1975) is an American business executive, software engineer, and investor who served as president and chief executive officer of Yahoo! from 2012 to 2017, when it was sold to Verizon. She was a long-time executive, usability leader and key spokesperson for Google (employee No. 20), and was its first woman software engineer. Mayer later co-founded Sunshine and, after its assets were acquired in 2025, founded the artificial intelligence company Dazzle AI.

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 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. 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. She was awarded the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award from Stanford.

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.

After graduating from Stanford, Mayer received 14 job offers, including a teaching job at Carnegie Mellon University and a consulting job at McKinsey & Company. As part of her interview at Google, she was quizzed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin on topics like artificial intelligence and user-friendly web design. She joined Google in 1999 as employee number 20, and was its first woman software engineer. She started out writing code and overseeing small teams of engineers, developing and designing Google's search offerings.

Although she was primarily a software engineer, she began to work on user interface design at the company. 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. Mayer stated that she felt many of the other search engines were overloaded and that Google needed to reduce clutter to improve usability. 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. AdWords helped deliver 96% of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2011.

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 2005, Mayer became vice president of search products and user experience. Mayer held key roles in the development of Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle, and Gmail.

Mayer was the vice president of Google search products and user experience until the end of 2010, when she was asked by then-CEO Eric Schmidt to head the local, maps, and location services. Mayer's new position was widely viewed as a demotion. That year, Schmidt promoted her to Google's operating committee, making her the youngest member of the committee at the time. In 2011, she secured Google's acquisition of survey site Zagat for $125 million. While Mayer was working at Google, she taught introductory computer programming at Stanford and mentored students at the East Palo Alto Charter School.

On July 16, 2012, Mayer was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo!, effective the following day. She was already a member of the company's board of directors. At the time of her appointment, Yahoo's financials had been falling behind those of Google for over a year and was experiencing a high rate of turnover among CEOs, management and high-level engineers. To simplify the bureaucratic process, Mayer launched an online program called PB&J to collect employee complaints and votes on problems in the office; a problem that generated at least 50 votes would trigger an investigation by online management. Some of Mayer's management policies were criticized by The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Mayer serves on the boards of directors of AT&T Inc., Hilton, Starbucks, and Walmart. She served on the board of Nextdoor from May 2024 to June 2025 and previously served on the board of Maisonette. She also serves or has served on several non-profit boards, including the San Francisco Ballet, Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum, and New York City Ballet. She served on the Board of Trustees at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 2013 to at least 2019.

Mayer actively invests in technology companies, including crowd-sourced design retailer Minted, live video platform Airtime.com, wireless power startup uBeam, online DIY community and e-commerce company Brit + Co., mobile payments processor Square, home décor site One Kings Lane, genetic testing company Natera, and nootropics and biohacking company HVMN.

Mayer was named to Fortune magazine's annual list of America's 50 Most Powerful Women in Business in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 with ranks at 50, 44, 42, 38, 14, 8 and 16 respectively. In 2008, at age 33, she was the youngest woman ever listed.

Mayer was named one of Glamour's Women of the Year in 2009. She was listed in the Forbes List of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women in 2012, 2013 and 2014, with ranks of 20, 32 and 18 respectively.

In September 2013, Mayer became the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to be featured in a Vogue magazine spread.

In 2013, she was also named in the Time 100, becoming the first woman listed as number one on Fortune magazine's annual list of the top 40 business stars under 40 years old. Mayer made Fortune magazine history in 2013, as the only person to feature in all three of its annual lists during the same year: Businessperson of the Year (No. 10), Most Powerful Women (at No. 8), and 40 Under 40 (No. 1) at the same time. In 2014, Mayer was ranked sixth on Fortune's 40 under 40 list, and was ranked the 16th most-powerful businesswoman in the world that year according to the same publication. In March 2016, Fortune then named Mayer as one of the world's most disappointing leaders.

On December 24, 2015, Mayer was listed by UK-based company Richtopia at number 14 in the list of 500 Most Influential CEOs.

Mayer dated Larry Page in the early 2000s while he was the CEO of Google. Mayer married lawyer and investor Zachary Bogue on December 12, 2009.

On the day Yahoo! announced her hiring, in July 2012, Mayer revealed that she was pregnant; she gave birth to a boy on September 30, 2012. Although she asked for baby name suggestions via social media, she eventually chose the name Macallister from an existing list. On December 10, 2015, Mayer announced that she had given birth to identical twin girls, Marielle and Sylvana.