The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (2024)

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Mayer was born in 1975 in a small Wisconsin town called Wausau. Her father was an engineer and her mother was an art teacher. Mayer once described the childhood version of herself as "painfully shy." Early on, Mayer developed a talent for math and science. "It wasn't until I was a professional woman mentoring other girls in math and science that I learned that openly liking math and science is unusual for girls," Mayer told Business Insider in 2013. Outside of school, Mayer was involved in a flurry of activities. She took piano lessons, danced ballet, and played sports as a kid. In high school, she was on both the "pompom" and debate teams, and worked a summer job at a local grocery store. Mayer applied to 10 schools — including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford — and got accepted into all of them. She ended up going to Stanford, where she first took pre-med courses in the hopes of becoming a brain doctor. By the end of freshman year, she was sick of it, and realized she was doing "too many flashcards." However, her life perspective changed after taking an introductory computer-science class called CS105. It led her to major in symbolic systems, a famous Stanford major whose alumni include LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger. Mayer was hard-working and focused on classes, and apparently didn't have much of a social life in college. She was shy, focused, and "not much for socializing," classmates have said. Mayer went on to teach symbolic systems classes as an upperclassman. After getting her bachelors degree, she stayed to earn a masters in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence. By the time she graduated in 1999, Mayer already had 12 job offers lined up. The last offer came from Google, a small startup at the time with less than 20 employees. Before then, Mayer was planning to take a job at consulting firm McKinsey. She estimated Google only had a 2% chance of surviving, but she was fascinated by its employees and what the place could teach her. She took the offer from Google —and worked there for the next 13 years. During Mayer's first two years at Google, she would work 100-hour weeks regularly as a programmer. She also continued to teach at Stanford for the first several years. However, Mayer thrived in the tough environment, and needed only four hours of sleep a night. Mayer also briefly dated Google cofounder Larry Page during her early years at the company. The relationship was very discreet, and they didn't show any affection in the office. One person described the relationship as "two quiet people dating each other quietly." Mayer quickly rose through the ranks at Google. She started out as a part-time member of the user interface team, but soon became a product manager. By 2005, she was named VP of search products and user experience. By then, she was already setting the agenda for the product meetings that involved Google's top executives. She was part of a small group of star executives called the "secret cabal," according to Steven Levy, who wrote a book on Google. Mayer was credited with the success of Google's search engine, as well as products such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google News. "Marissa makes the decisions she feels are right, and history proves that she probably calls it right," cofounder Sergey Brin once said about Mayer. However, Mayer had a hard time relating to others, which proved difficult for managing employees and overseeing Google's consumer products. In order to relate better, Mayer learned to mirror her tech habits to those of consumers and heavily relied on data for redesigning products. But her obsessive attention to detail and data-driven management style created some enemies at Google. A famous Google designer named Doug Bowman quit over it, saying, "I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle." As Google continued to grow, it generated more press, and much of that attention was aimed at Mayer. She was great with the press, and the media loved her back, too. Google even had a group of public relations people who were devoted to promoting her career. When Google went public in 2004, Mayer became rich in an instant. She bought the $5 million penthouse suite she was living in at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, and another home closer to Google's Mountain View campus. Mayer became a part of the San Francisco high-end social scene, and was known for throwing lavish Halloween parties. She threw many of them at a funeral home in Palo Alto — called the Roller & Hapgood & Tinney Funeral Home — that she bought in 2013 for $11.2 million. Mayer even hosted a Democratic party fundraiser at her house in 2010. President Barack Obama gave a speech at the $3,000-a-ticket function. In 2009, Mayer got married to a San Francisco investor named Zach Bogue, who she had met at Larry Page's wedding two years earlier. They held two wedding ceremonies: one in California, and another in Mayer's hometown of Wausau, Wisconsin. However, frustration was growing internally at Google. Mayer appeared uninterested in the business side of the company, insisted she was always right, and was pedantic in her leadership style. Amit Singhal — the man behind the algorithms that power the search engine — didn't get along with Mayer, and went directly to Larry Page to ask him to remove Mayer from the search team. Mayer was moved to the team that managed Google Maps and local products. Although she was still one of Google's top executives, it was seen as a demotion: She was no longer in charge of Google's most lucrative and money-generating product. By 2011, Mayer's powerful run at Google was coming to an end. But another opportunity came in June 2012: The board for a competing internet company, Yahoo, wanted Mayer to be its new CEO. Other people discussed were Nikesh Arora, then the chief business officer at Google, and Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of internet software and services. Some insiders had reservations about hiring Mayer, questioning her lack of experience managing the finances and corporate operations of a business. Nevertheless, she was offered the job, and started at Yahoo in July 2012 as CEO and president. Just two months after taking the CEO job, Mayer gave birth to her first child, named Macallister. She took just two weeks off for maternity leave before returning to work, where she then set up a nursery in her office for a full-time nanny to take care of the baby. "There's never a distinct line between work and home," Bogue, Mayer's husband, told Business Insider in 2013. "Marissa's work is such a natural extension of her. It's not something she needs to shed at the end of the day." Mayer soon started to face some criticism after she banned Yahoo employees from working from home, and called taking care of her baby "easy" during a women-in-business conference. Mayer told Business Insider in 2013 that she's not a feminist: Instead, she's "blind to gender." Mayer gave birth again in December 2015 to identical twins, named Sylvana and Marielle. She took only five days off before returning back to work. Mayer was credited for drastically improving some of Yahoo's product designs and traffic to its core apps. She enacted a series of reforms to upend the internal culture at Yahoo, and brought back excitement into the flailing company. However, revenue in Yahoo's core business stubbornly refused to pick up, and Mayer was blamed. After some of her key C-suite executives left, she made a series of costly decisions that didn't pan out, including a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging startup Tumblr. Critics started to blame Mayer for spending millions for business expenses, including $108 million a year for free food for employees and a $7 million end-of-year bash to ring in 2016. More than 2,000 job cuts came in 2015 and 2016. After months of hardship, Yahoo looked to sell its web business. It was announced in July 2016 that Verizon was buying Yahoo for nearly $5 billion, and merging the company's core business with Verizon's AOL to form a new entity called "Oath." Soon after the merger was complete, Mayer resigned from her role as Yahoo CEO and stepped down from the company's board. Before the deal was finalized, it came to light that major security breaches in 2014 had affected over 1 billion Yahoo customers. Mayer and other Yahoo executives' failure to reveal the breaches to the public until two years later cost Mayer millions in bonuses and payouts, although she did still leave with a $23 million severance package. Mayer told Business Insider in 2017 she was interested in another CEO role. However, she later revealed she launched a startup called Lumi Labs in March 2018, and was running it out of Google's old office for the "good juju" there. According to Lumi's website, the startup in focused "on building consumer applications enabled by artificial intelligence." Their first project, released in 2019, is called Holiday Helper, and is designed to easily create mailing labels for gifts and cards. Mayer has also turned attention toward the local Palo Alto community where she lives. In 2018, Mayer told city council she wanted to turn her funeral home — the one where she threw her famous Halloween parties — into a facility that serves women and families in the community. However, neighbors have pushed back against her proposal. The funeral home is located just a few blocks from where Mayer herself lives, with her husband and three kids in Palo Alto's University South neighborhood. The five-bedroom home costs an estimated $5.2 million, and is reportedly decorated with pricey sculptures and a grand piano. Now, Mayer is worth a paltry $620 million, while her former Google higher-ups are worth billions of dollars in their executive positions. It seems she's focusing on Lumi Labs, and is making the rounds at tech conferences and panels to talk about next project. Read next

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Matt Weinberger and Paige Leskin

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2020-02-11T20:04:00Z

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (1)

It's been more than two years since Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, resigned after five years of trying to turn around the trajectory of the company's sinking ship.
Mayer, 44, started out in Silicon Valley as Google's 20th employee. Now, she's pursuing her own venture, and is running a tech incubator called Lumi Labs.
Here's everything you need to know about Mayer, the Wisconsin-born former tech executive once the star among Silicon Valley elite.
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Hopes were high when Marissa Mayer was hired as CEO of Yahoo in 2012. People thought she would turn around the perennially dysfunctional internet giant.

Five years years later, and Mayer's time at Yahoo was marred by slowing growth and internal dissent, leading to plummeting employee morale and calls for her resignation. She resigned from the company as soon as its sale to Verizon was finalized, and left with a $23 million severance package.

Now, Mayer is focusing on her newest venture, a startup called Lumi Labs. She's shown interest in opening a women's club at a funeral home in Palo Alto, where she once threw lavish parties for the Silicon Valley elite.

Here's what you need to know about Marissa Mayer, who went from Google's 20th employee to Yahoo's CEO:

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This is an update to a story originally written by Eugene Kim.

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Mayer was born in 1975 in a small Wisconsin town called Wausau. Her father was an engineer and her mother was an art teacher.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (5)

Source: Business Insider

Mayer once described the childhood version of herself as "painfully shy." Early on, Mayer developed a talent for math and science. "It wasn't until I was a professional woman mentoring other girls in math and science that I learned that openly liking math and science is unusual for girls," Mayer told Business Insider in 2013.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (6)

Source: Business Insider

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Outside of school, Mayer was involved in a flurry of activities. She took piano lessons, danced ballet, and played sports as a kid. In high school, she was on both the "pompom" and debate teams, and worked a summer job at a local grocery store.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (7)

Source: Business Insider

Mayer applied to 10 schools — including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford — and got accepted into all of them. She ended up going to Stanford, where she first took pre-med courses in the hopes of becoming a brain doctor. By the end of freshman year, she was sick of it, and realized she was doing "too many flashcards."

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (8)

Source: Business Insider

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However, her life perspective changed after taking an introductory computer-science class called CS105. It led her to major in symbolic systems, a famous Stanford major whose alumni include LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (9)

Source: Business Insider

Mayer was hard-working and focused on classes, and apparently didn't have much of a social life in college. She was shy, focused, and "not much for socializing," classmates have said.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (10)

Source: Business Insider

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Mayer went on to teach symbolic systems classes as an upperclassman. After getting her bachelors degree, she stayed to earn a masters in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (11)

Source: Business Insider

By the time she graduated in 1999, Mayer already had 12 job offers lined up. The last offer came from Google, a small startup at the time with less than 20 employees.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (12)

Source: Business Insider

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Before then, Mayer was planning to take a job at consulting firm McKinsey. She estimated Google only had a 2% chance of surviving, but she was fascinated by its employees and what the place could teach her. She took the offer from Google —and worked there for the next 13 years.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (13)

Source: Business Insider

During Mayer's first two years at Google, she would work 100-hour weeks regularly as a programmer. She also continued to teach at Stanford for the first several years. However, Mayer thrived in the tough environment, and needed only four hours of sleep a night.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (14)

Source: Business Insider

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Mayer also briefly dated Google cofounder Larry Page during her early years at the company. The relationship was very discreet, and they didn't show any affection in the office. One person described the relationship as "two quiet people dating each other quietly."

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (15)

Source: Business Insider

Mayer quickly rose through the ranks at Google. She started out as a part-time member of the user interface team, but soon became a product manager. By 2005, she was named VP of search products and user experience.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (16)

Source: Business Insider

Advertisem*nt

By then, she was already setting the agenda for the product meetings that involved Google's top executives. She was part of a small group of star executives called the "secret cabal," according to Steven Levy, who wrote a book on Google.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (17)

Mayer was credited with the success of Google's search engine, as well as products such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google News. "Marissa makes the decisions she feels are right, and history proves that she probably calls it right," cofounder Sergey Brin once said about Mayer.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (18)

Source: Business Insider

Advertisem*nt

However, Mayer had a hard time relating to others, which proved difficult for managing employees and overseeing Google's consumer products. In order to relate better, Mayer learned to mirror her tech habits to those of consumers and heavily relied on data for redesigning products.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (19)

Source: Business Insider

But her obsessive attention to detail and data-driven management style created some enemies at Google. A famous Google designer named Doug Bowman quit over it, saying, "I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (20)

Source: Business Insider

As Google continued to grow, it generated more press, and much of that attention was aimed at Mayer. She was great with the press, and the media loved her back, too. Google even had a group of public relations people who were devoted to promoting her career.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (21)

Source: Business Insider

When Google went public in 2004, Mayer became rich in an instant. She bought the $5 million penthouse suite she was living in at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, and another home closer to Google's Mountain View campus.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (22)

Source: Business Insider

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Mayer became a part of the San Francisco high-end social scene, and was known for throwing lavish Halloween parties. She threw many of them at a funeral home in Palo Alto — called the Roller & Hapgood & Tinney Funeral Home — that she bought in 2013 for $11.2 million.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (23)

Source: Business Insider

Mayer even hosted a Democratic party fundraiser at her house in 2010. President Barack Obama gave a speech at the $3,000-a-ticket function.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (24)

Source: Business Insider

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In 2009, Mayer got married to a San Francisco investor named Zach Bogue, who she had met at Larry Page's wedding two years earlier. They held two wedding ceremonies: one in California, and another in Mayer's hometown of Wausau, Wisconsin.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (25)

Source: Business Insider

However, frustration was growing internally at Google. Mayer appeared uninterested in the business side of the company, insisted she was always right, and was pedantic in her leadership style.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (26)

Source: Business Insider

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Amit Singhal — the man behind the algorithms that power the search engine — didn't get along with Mayer, and went directly to Larry Page to ask him to remove Mayer from the search team.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (27)

As a footnote, Singhal would eventually leave Google for Uber. In February 2017, Singhal stepped down from his role at Uber after it was discovered there were sexual-harassment allegations against him at his previous job at Google that he did not disclose when he was hired.

Mayer was moved to the team that managed Google Maps and local products. Although she was still one of Google's top executives, it was seen as a demotion: She was no longer in charge of Google's most lucrative and money-generating product. By 2011, Mayer's powerful run at Google was coming to an end.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (28)

Source: Business Insider

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But another opportunity came in June 2012: The board for a competing internet company, Yahoo, wanted Mayer to be its new CEO. Other people discussed were Nikesh Arora, then the chief business officer at Google, and Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of internet software and services.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (29)

Source: Business Insider

Some insiders had reservations about hiring Mayer, questioning her lack of experience managing the finances and corporate operations of a business. Nevertheless, she was offered the job, and started at Yahoo in July 2012 as CEO and president.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (30)

Source: Business Insider

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Just two months after taking the CEO job, Mayer gave birth to her first child, named Macallister. She took just two weeks off for maternity leave before returning to work, where she then set up a nursery in her office for a full-time nanny to take care of the baby.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (31)

Source: Business Insider

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"There's never a distinct line between work and home," Bogue, Mayer's husband, told Business Insider in 2013. "Marissa's work is such a natural extension of her. It's not something she needs to shed at the end of the day."

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (32)

Source: Business Insider

Mayer soon started to face some criticism after she banned Yahoo employees from working from home, and called taking care of her baby "easy" during a women-in-business conference. Mayer told Business Insider in 2013 that she's not a feminist: Instead, she's "blind to gender."

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (33)

Source: Business Insider

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Mayer gave birth again in December 2015 to identical twins, named Sylvana and Marielle. She took only five days off before returning back to work.

—marissamayer (@marissamayer) January 30, 2016

Source: Marissa Mayer on Twitter, Haute Living

Mayer was credited for drastically improving some of Yahoo's product designs and traffic to its core apps. She enacted a series of reforms to upend the internal culture at Yahoo, and brought back excitement into the flailing company.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (34)

Source: Business Insider

Advertisem*nt

However, revenue in Yahoo's core business stubbornly refused to pick up, and Mayer was blamed. After some of her key C-suite executives left, she made a series of costly decisions that didn't pan out, including a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging startup Tumblr.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (35)

Critics started to blame Mayer for spending millions for business expenses, including $108 million a year for free food for employees and a $7 million end-of-year bash to ring in 2016. More than 2,000 job cuts came in 2015 and 2016.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (36)

Source: New York Post

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After months of hardship, Yahoo looked to sell its web business. It was announced in July 2016 that Verizon was buying Yahoo for nearly $5 billion, and merging the company's core business with Verizon's AOL to form a new entity called "Oath." Soon after the merger was complete, Mayer resigned from her role as Yahoo CEO and stepped down from the company's board.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (37)

Source: Business Insider

Before the deal was finalized, it came to light that major security breaches in 2014 had affected over 1 billion Yahoo customers. Mayer and other Yahoo executives' failure to reveal the breaches to the public until two years later cost Mayer millions in bonuses and payouts, although she did still leave with a $23 million severance package.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (38)

Source: Business Insider

Advertisem*nt

Mayer told Business Insider in 2017 she was interested in another CEO role. However, she later revealed she launched a startup called Lumi Labs in March 2018, and was running it out of Google's old office for the "good juju" there.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (39)

Source: Business Insider, New York Times

According to Lumi's website, the startup in focused "on building consumer applications enabled by artificial intelligence." Their first project, released in 2019, is called Holiday Helper, and is designed to easily create mailing labels for gifts and cards.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (40)

Source: Business Insider

Advertisem*nt

Mayer has also turned attention toward the local Palo Alto community where she lives. In 2018, Mayer told city council she wanted to turn her funeral home — the one where she threw her famous Halloween parties — into a facility that serves women and families in the community. However, neighbors have pushed back against her proposal.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (41)

Source: Business Insider

The funeral home is located just a few blocks from where Mayer herself lives, with her husband and three kids in Palo Alto's University South neighborhood. The five-bedroom home costs an estimated $5.2 million, and is reportedly decorated with pricey sculptures and a grand piano.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (42)

Source: Vogue

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Now, Mayer is worth a paltry $620 million, while her former Google higher-ups are worth billions of dollars in their executive positions. It seems she's focusing on Lumi Labs, and is making the rounds at tech conferences and panels to talk about next project.

The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture (43)

Source: Forbes