CEO of Yahoo is a long way from Wausau West High School in northern Wisconsin, where Marissa Mayer graduated in ’93. See below her chat with the 92nd Street Y on growing up in the Badger State. And according to the Wausau Daily Herald, she was a member of the “Key Club,” a service group connected to the Kiwanis Club, and a standout student. At Stanford, she went all nerdy and did an undergrad in “Symbolic
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| Marissa Mayer during her Wisconsin childhood |
Systems,” then went back for a master’s because she’d never coded a compiler — a program that reduces programming language to machine code (0’s and 1’s) — or an operating system. (You know, like Windows.)
The Wisconsinite studied artificial intelligence as well, the simulation of intelligent thinking by a computer, which came in handy when she interviewed with Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1999. (They had to cut the first interview short to run and meet with a venture capitalist.) But before that, Mayer managed to scribble some AI-related charts and graphs on a board and hold Brin’s attention, at least. Page seemed distracted. But they hired her to be Google’s 20th employee and its first female engineer. She went on to be VP of Search Products and User Experience, and was a spokeswoman for the company, including on assorted privacy scandals.
Back in ’99, she could have gone down an easier path, rather than working 100- and 130-hour weeks at toddler-stage Google. And, she admits, the first overtures from Brin and Page were less than captivating. “I don’t have time to mess with a startup,” thought Mayer, fresh off an internship at the Union Bank of Switzerland.
