Mayer, Marissa (1975-…), was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Yahoo! Inc. , a multinational Internet corporation founded in 1994. Mayer became CEO in 2012, at a time when Yahoo! struggled to compete against such rival Internet companies as Google and Facebook . She resigned from the position in 2017.
Mayer was born on May 30, 1975, in Wausau, Wisconsin. She received B.S. and M.S. degrees from Stanford University, both in fields of computer science. Mayer worked as an intern at SRI International , a research and development firm in Menlo Park, California. She also worked an internship at the research lab of UBS, a financial services company in Zurich, Switzerland.
In 1999, Mayer began working at Google Inc., then a new company. She was the first woman engineer to work there. Over 13 years, Mayer held many positions at Google. She worked on a wide diversity of projects, including Google’s search engine , map program, and e-mail service. She also had creative control over Google’s home page, known for its simplicity.
As CEO of Yahoo!, Mayer was credited with reviving the company’s fortunes after years of disappointing earnings. Mayer focused the company’s growth in mobile products and in core content, such as e-mail and news. Mayer aggressively acquired dozens of smaller companies. Her major acquisitions included the photo-sharing website Flickr and the blogging site Tumblr. These acquisitions helped attract top engineering talent for Yahoo!. Mayer’s notable projects at Yahoo! include overhauls to the company’s mail and weather applications.
In 2016, Yahoo! announced the sale of its core Internet business to the telecommunications company Verizon. The sale was completed in June 2017. Mayer resigned from Yahoo! upon completion of the sale.
