Marissa Mayer is an American software engineer and businesswoman who was an early employee at Google and greatly influenced its development. She also served as President and CEO of Yahoo from 2012 until 2017, working to revitalize the company during a time when it was being written off by the tech industry.
In 2018, Mayer co-founded Lumi Labs, now called Sunshine, which creates AI-based apps, including a contact manager. She has been named among the most powerful people in the business industry several times by various media outlets over the years.
“I didn’t set out to be at the top of technology companies,” she said to Vogue in 2013. “I’m just geeky and shy and I like to code.”
Mayer was born in Wausau, Wisconsin in 1975 and showed an interest in math and science from an early age. She excelled in chemistry, calculus, biology, and physics in high school and entered Stanford University with the intention of becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon.
She later switched her major to symbolic systems and computer science with an emphasis on artificial intelligence, which combined philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science. After graduating with honors from Stanford with her bachelor of science, Mayer interned at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, and Ubilab, the Union Bank of Switzerland’s research lab based in Zurich. She holds several patents in artificial intelligence and interface design.
Mayer sits on several boards of directors, including Walmart, Maisonette, and Jawbone, as well as several non-profit boards, including Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; New York City Ballet; San Francisco Ballet; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
She is an active investor in several technology companies, including crowd-sourced design retailer Minted, live video platform Airtime.com, wireless power startup uBeam, online do-it-yourself community and e-commerce company Brit + Co., mobile payments processor Square, home decor site One Kings Lane, genetic testing company Natera, and health supplement and biohacking company Nootrobox.
Mayer resides in Palo Alto, California with her family and Aibo robot dog, Rover. She is an avid art collector, a cupcake aficionado, and actively participates in marathons. According to Forbes, her net worth is roughly $770 million.