On Tuesday night, Google’s 20th employee and first female engineer—the elegant Marissa Mayer—spoke to a near sold-out crowd at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan about growing up “geeky” in Wisconsin, her most recent work challenges (one of the key developers of Gmail and Google Search, she is currently the search giant’s VP of Maps and Local), and the best advice she ever received. Inspired, we looked back in our archives to find our 2009 profile on Mayer, published in _Vogue’_s annual “Age” issue.
_______________________________________________________________________
At 34, Marissa Mayer is possibly the world's most poised and powerful infomation guru. Sally Singer searches for what makes this woman click.
Before I meet Marissa Mayer, the 34-year-old megamillionaire, Oscar de la Renta–obsessed, computer-programming Google executive who lives in a penthouse atop the Four Seasons, San Francisco, I of course Google her. Virtually, Mayer—pronounced not like the musician John but the hot dog Oscar—is an agglomeration of podcasts (she has a wonderful Kathleen Turner voice), red-carpet images, and text snippets about the physics of data, the future of news, and atomic units of consumption.
In actuality, Mayer is just as resistant to the kinds of unitary categories that the regular three-dimensional world insists on. It’s not only that she demolishes old-fashioned oppositions of beauty and brains, or women and science, or chic and geek. It’s that she’s elusive in person (meeting her, as I do in New York and San Francisco and Mountain View, California, is all about fragments of time, as her busyness is quasi-presidential); that she works for a company that makes billions in the transparency business but is opaque with regard to its internal doings; and, most definitively, that she is so extreme and multipolar in her accomplishments that one fumbles to bundle it all up into the linear narrative so beloved by humans since the Bible. So why not go with the flow? Why not search for her as she has taught us to search for pretty much everything else?
“Marissa Mayer” + Job:
In 1999, a Stanford computer-science M.A. turns down a teaching job at Carnegie Mellon, among other opportunities, in order to join a fledgling Silicon Valley start-up with a silly name. At the job interview (I’m told by Craig Silverstein, who was there along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and is now director of technology), she’s asked stuff like “How would you write a spell-check program when you have a vocabulary so big it won’t fit in a computer?” Mayer becomes Google employee number 20 (or maybe sixteen; nobody’s quite sure). She and Google flourish. (Says computer-science professor Eric Roberts, her Stanford mentor, “She hitched her wagon to the correct star. That’s not a negative critique of her; that’s what the Valley is like.” He adds, “Success in this field is dependent on temperament,” i.e., “the drive not to be beaten by machines.”) A product manager, she creates the famous home page: simple and unchanging, delightful to purists and pragmatists alike. (The most senior woman at Google, Vice President of Business Operations Shona Brown, says, “Her fingers are all over the actual designs, their simplicity and intuitive ease of use, their clean use. That’s hard to stick to for ten years.” Brin says, “Marissa makes the decisions she feels are right, and history proves that she probably calls it right.”) As the company grows, so too Mayer’s responsibilities: She oversees the development, code-writing, and launch of Gmail, Google Maps, iGoogle, Google Chrome, Google Health, and Google News. There is a vast, impenetrable techie world of Google profit-making activity that is insider stuff; but Google for the masses, the one you and I know and rely on, is Mayer’s fiefdom. In short, she is obsessed with puzzling out the consumer’s relationship to clicks. (“I really believe that the virtual world mirrors the physical world. It’s the roommate problem: Where would she put the scissors?”) This means sitting in a room with a dozen or so scruffy, brainy men in baggy shorts, and making lots of decisions in Manolos and beaded Carolina Herrera separates. Mayer will say things like “We’re not thinking about this in a principled way” or “You guys are highlighting the metrics that you like” or “With data collection, ‘The sooner the better’ is always the best answer.”
“Marissa Mayer” + Stuff:
On her thirty-fourth birthday, a Saturday in May, Mayer is at the Googleplex in Mountain View, interviewing applicants for the associate-product-manager program. (“This could have been the worst birthday ever, but it’s something to see that collection of talent. At five o’clock I was so energized.” Then she goes home to San Francisco and, wearing turquoise-fringed Manolos and an Alberta Ferretti dress “in every color of the rainbow,” throws a party organized by her regular party planner, Robert Fountain.) She asks the interviewees to name something cool and an object that makes them happy. When we dine at the Google cafeteria a few days later (chicken curry, rice, naan bread; yes, she eats carbs, but see below), I ask her the same questions. Objects that make Mayer happy include her Oscar de la Renta cashmere cardigan with three-quarter sleeves and pointelle detailing and enamel buttons. (She owns four—off-white, oatmeal, navy, black—and bought 20 more as Christmas gifts for her girlfriends. “They were on sale at the end of the season.” De la Renta says, “She’s one of my biggest customers.”) There’s her watch, an Omega De Ville, 18K-gold face with a stainless-steel band, bought in Zurich in 2002. (“The watch really connects me to that summer. Also, it was a good deal. I paid in Swiss francs, and the currency moved a lot that summer. It represents Switzerland and my cleverness with the currency switch.”) There’s the Pixar film Up (“Loved it”) and SK-II skin care (“I tried it because of Cate Blanchett’s endorsement—very cool that it is a by-product of sake”). There’s Twitter Search, and Huggable Hangers (found by Mom in Wisconsin, they “almost allow there to be space between my clothes”), and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and Olafur Eliasson’s show at SFMOMA (“How can a geek not love geodesic domes?”).
“Marissa Mayer” + Cheerleading:
Contrary to what turns up on Google, Mayer has never been a cheerleader. “I never yelled at anything or led cheers. I’m way too shy. I took a classical-ballet training and turned it into dance team in high school.” We’re talking Wausau, Wisconsin, where Mr. Mayer, an environmental engineer who works for water-treatment plants, creates an ice rink in the backyard for Marissa’s hockey-crazed brother (she has no sister), and Mrs. Mayer, a homemaker and museum lover, spends years ferrying her daughter to ice skating, ballet, piano, embroidery/cross-stitch, cake decorating, Brownies, swimming, skiing, and golf. (“You give them every experience you can, and then they gradually eliminate things,” says Mom.) By junior high, Marissa is dancing 35 hours a week (Mom: “Ballet taught her criticism and discipline, poise and confidence”). In high school, she’s president of the Spanish club and treasurer of the Key Club, and does piano, debate, Math Club, baby-sitting (she takes lessons), academic decathlon, and Junior Achievement (she sells fire-starters). She applies to ten colleges and is accepted by all. At Stanford, she dances in the university ballet’s Nutcracker, does parliamentary debate, volunteers at children’s hospitals, helps bring computer-science education to Bermuda’s schools, and starts teaching in her junior year. Her degree is in symbolic systems.
“Marissa Mayer” + Love:
“I’m bringing a boy I think you’d be interested in,” a friend warns Mayer in 2007. “Be cool.” That boy, Zack Bogue, a lawyer/investment manager/athlete/philanthropist, will marry Mayer at the end of this year. They spend every night together, at any one of their three homes—his loft in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, her penthouse, or her house in Palo Alto (for late nights at the Googleplex). They share a passion for cooking (Bogue: “There are people who grill and there are people who cook. We like to cook”) and marathons and triathlons with minimal prep (Mayer: “I like to get myself in over my head. Zack has that same trait”) and hard labor. “We continue to do work in the evening,” says Bogue. “There’s never a distinct line between work and home. Marissa’s work is such a natural extension of her. It’s not something she needs to shed at the end of the day.” He adds wryly, “She has converted me to bringing my laptop everywhere: You never know when you’ll get fifteen minutes’ worth of work done.” She’s also converted him to sleeping an hour less per night. On a recent trip to Wausau, Mayer worked late into the evening, revising a speech she was to deliver at a Midwestern university. Her mother, Margaret, says, “It was one of those long-night-type things. She woke Zack up at 5:00 a.m. and wanted to give her speech; I said, ‘Zack, you signed up for it. Now you know.’ ” Zack knows and thrives. “Marissa is a ball of energy. We feed off each other and wake up in the middle of a 34-mile cross-country [skiing] trek.” It was Mayer’s third time on Nordic skis. “Did we do great?” says Mayer. “No. My parents were really worried: Why haven’t they finished?” She laughs her throaty laugh. “Do something you’re not ready to do. In the worst case, you’ll learn something about your limitations.”
“Marissa Mayer” + Color:
At 9:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings, Mayer has highlights at Secret Agent with Melissa, or an air-dried bob from Andrew at diPietro Todd, or a wax, manicure, and pedicure by Alisa and Stella at LaBelle. She books her appointments two months in advance because “if you adhere to that periodicity, people expect you.” She buys fashion with similar precision: twice a year at Bergdorf Goodman with a personal shopper, having trawled Style.com (one of her nine most-viewed Web pages) for her favorite labels: Oscar, Carolina, Etro (“I can take their stuff, ball it in a suitcase, and it comes out fine”), Tuleh, Angel Sanchez, and Armani “pants and suits” (for testifying before Congress). She tracks department-store sales online, receives a daily mailing from Gilt Groupe, and “uses Google product search for something really specific, such as a specific pair of Stuart Weitzman shoes.” With the exception of her black Chanel bag, she is drawn to vibrancy and whimsy. Spring 2009 was a rough time: “The different shades of white have been hard on me—white, ivory, more white.”
“Marissa Mayer” + “Margaret Mead”:
Mayer shares her office with seven others. Lava lamps and geeky trophies abound. (In the common areas there are scooters, Lego, happy-face Mylar balloons, massage loungers, snacks galore, fitness balls. On weekends, Mayer sits on a fitness ball instead of a desk chair.) A junior female colleague enters and says, “The guy I’m seeing disabled his wall. Isn’t that sketch?” For Mayer, this is also an anthropological moment; i.e., she has learned that the younger people are suspicious of those who take down their Facebook page. She is already aware that her protégés use E-mail for formal communications: “Conversation is SMS, Twitter, and chat.” She and Zack use E-mail (and IM) because that’s what people in their early 30s do. Sergey Brin told me, “From a technical point of view, these new products aren’t that different. The underlying technology doesn’t change that much. It makes these apparent changes a lot more steady than they might seem.” Mayer’s job is to be in sync with change. She carries an iPhone “to have a non-Google product to better simulate the user. Similarly, I refused to get a broadband connection at home until 2004, when over 50 percent of Americans used broadband at home.” Mayer, in other words, is us. Never mind that she’s “tri-platform” (Linux, PC, Mac) and wrote the code that enabled 18,000 Google employees to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on its opening night.
“Marissa Mayer” + Cheese:
“I had no idea how to eat sensibly.” Last year Mayer woke up to the Google fifteen, which is probably inevitable if you work 100 hours a week in a munchies-filled office. She’d been eating five sticks of cheese a day—a Wisconsin thing?—and realized this was bad when she joined Weight Watchers online (for “$16.95 a month and a good scale you can buy at Target”): “They’re two points each!”
“Marissa Mayer” + Superhero:
Google the foregoing. Google “Zack Bogue” + uncanny resemblance to Clark Kent. Google Google.