Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer is the CEO of Yahoo. Most recently, she was Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services at Google, where she oversaw product management, engineering, design, and strategy for the company’s suite of local and geographical products, including Google Maps, Google Earth, Zagat, Street View, and local search, for desktop and mobile. She also curated the Google Doodle program, celebrating special events on Google’s homepage around the world. During her 12 years at Google, Marissa held numerous positions, including engineer, designer, product manager, and executive, and has launched over 100 well-known features and products. She played an instrumental role in Google Search, leading the product management efforts for more than 10 years, a period during which Google Search grew from a few hundred thousand to well over a billion searches per day. Marissa led the development of some of Google’s most successful services including image, book and product search, toolbar, and iGoogle, and defined such pivotal products as Google News and Gmail. She is listed as an inventor on several patents in artificial intelligence and interface design. As Google’s first female engineer in 1999, Marissa played an important role in developing Google’s culture. Her contributions have included overseeing the look-and-feel of the company’s iconic homepage and founding the Associate Product Manager program, which has hired over 300 of the company’s future leaders. Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab in Zurich, Switzerland and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. She graduated with honors from Stanford University with a BS in Symbolic Systems and a MS in Computer Science. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence. While at Stanford, she taught computer programming to more than 3,000 students and received the Centennial Teaching and Forsythe Awards for her contributions to undergraduate education. In 2008, the Illinois Institute of Technology awarded her an honorary doctorate of engineering. She has been honored with the Matrix Award by New York Women in Communications, as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, as a member of the “New Establishment” by Vanity Fair, with the American Art Award by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and as “Woman of the Year” by Glamour magazine. Fortune has named her one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business for four years running. Marissa serves on the boards of various non-profits, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Ballet, the Smithsonian National Design Museum and the New York City Ballet.