Marissa Mayer Quotes

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Marissa Mayer

Profession : Businesswoman

Birth : May 30, 1975

I think that ultimately over time we really should strive for a place where most information is available online and is searchable.

Marissa Mayer

I think what's really amazing is that given the scale of the web and getting the compute power we have today, we're starting to see things that appear intelligent but actually aren't semantically intelligent.

Marissa Mayer

When I came to Yahoo! in 2012, I came because I really wanted to work hard. I thought it was a great challenge.

Marissa Mayer

The turning point for me was realizing that I would learn more at Google, trying to build a company, regardless of whether we failed or succeeded, than I would at any of the other companies I had offers from.

Marissa Mayer

The thing that surprised me and really puzzled me is that the job is really fun. Yahoo is a really fun place to work.

Marissa Mayer

My first week at Stanford, I bought a computer, and it was the first computer I ever owned. I had to be taught how to turn it on and even how to use a mouse, even though, for a lot of people, a mouse is very intuitive.

Marissa Mayer

I think, you know, a fellow CEO said to me that the interesting thing about being CEO that's really striking is that you have very few decisions that you need to make, and you need to make them absolutely perfectly.

Marissa Mayer

Blackberry is a great product and really useful. But I think that Yahoo!'s future is going to be rooted in mobile apps. And we know that we need to have apps on some of the core platforms, and so iOS and Android, probably the two most important platforms for us.

Marissa Mayer

I really like even numbers, and I like heavily divisible numbers. Twelve is my lucky number - I just love how divisible it is. I don't like odd numbers, and I really don't like primes. When I turned 37, I put on a strong face, but I was not looking forward to 37. But 37 turned out to be a pretty amazing year.

Marissa Mayer

I think like my dad, but I have a huge kinship with my mom.

Marissa Mayer

It was a very well-rounded childhood with lots of different opportunities. My mom will say she set out to overstimulate me - surround me with way too many things and let me pick. As a result, I've always been a multitasker; I've always liked a lot of variety.

Marissa Mayer

I didn't set out to be at the top of technology companies. I'm just geeky and shy, and I like to code.

Marissa Mayer

There are probably industries where gender is more of an issue, but our industry is not one where I think that's relevant.

Marissa Mayer

When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'

Marissa Mayer

Management is defense. You basically say, 'This is the direction; this is where we're heading,' and then it's my job to get everything else out of the way. All the other things that can become a distraction keep us from executing well. Get those out of the way, because the team ultimately needs to run in that direction and execute well.

Marissa Mayer

I think that for me, it's God, family and Yahoo - in that order.

Marissa Mayer

The interesting thing is when you look at what people want to do on their phone, it's mail, weather, check stock quotes and news. That's Yahoo's business. This is a huge opportunity for us because we have the content and all the information people want on their phones.

Marissa Mayer

I want Yahoo to be the absolute best place to work, to have a fantastic culture.

Marissa Mayer

I loved Stanford and symbolic systems. For me, I came to Stanford assuming I would be a doctor and got really deep into chemistry and biology, but I noticed everyone who was on the same track as me was taking the exact same classes. I wanted to do something more unique.

Marissa Mayer

Before Google, I spent the summer building a program that would look at what websites you would go to and what websites other people would go to - and built a collaborative filtering program that helped you find related sites to look at.

Marissa Mayer