By Marika Sboros
Look at her now, and it’s hard to believe Yahoo CEO and President Marissa Mayer was painfully shy as a child. Mayer credits ballet training with teaching her “criticism and discipline, poise and confidence”.
Her earliest ambition was paediatric neurosurgery, and she went into pre-med at Stanford University.
She made a dramatic career switch, moving into symbolic systems, a discipline of computer science combining paradigms and ideas from cognitive science, artificial intelligence and human/computer interaction.
She found her niche.
Mayer graduated with honours from Stanford with a bachelor, then a masters degree, specialising in both in artificial intelligence.
After graduation in 1999, she had 14 job offers, including a teaching post at Carnegie Mellon University and a consultancy at McKinsey. She chose Google, becoming its 20th employee, first female engineer, and Vice President in 2005, with stock options to match. Her current net worth of $300 million was accumulated mostly at Google.
In 2009, the Illinois Institute of Technology granted Mayer an honorary doctorate in recognition of her work in Internet search engines.
Mayer joined Yahoo in July 2012 as President and CEO, briefed to revive the failing fortunes of a “pathologically relaxed company”.
She holds patents in artificial intelligence and interface design, and actively invests in technology companies, and sits on the boards of directors of Yahoo, Walmart and Jawbone, and on several non-profit boards, including the New York City Ballet, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Mayer was named to Fortune magazine’s annual list of America’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business annually from 2008 to 2013, seeing her rankings rise from 50 to 8, and 16 in 2014. She is 18 on Forbes list of The 25 Most Powerful Women In The World, 2014
At the World Economic Forum last year, she was a member of the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014.
