When Marissa Mayer’s mentor suggested that she apply to work at a new startup, he couldn’t actually remember the name of the company. The opportunity was just interesting enough to recommend to a talented, young Stanford graduate with a specialization in artificial Intelligence. It was not yet a startup worth knowing, and certainly not yet the verb that’s now synonymous with “search.” After some hesitation about working at a startup when she had more than twenty other lucrative job offers, Mayer ended up going for the position – and became Google employee No. 20. She went on to develop the company – alongside the duo that’s now attained rockstar-status, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
After a long career working on the main search engine, Mayer became the head of the Geo and Maps division, setting the foundation for the success that Google Maps has turned into today. In 2012, the Maps app was about to launch. Mayer was pregnant and imagining the long maternity leave ahead when Yahoo shook everything up and asked Mayer to be its CEO. Mayer said yes. She went on to run the company from 2012-2017, up until Yahoo was acquired by Verizon.
Mayer’s career has been illustrious and historic – she’s created technology that our society has come to depend on, and she’s been a leader at two of the three internet companies with the most users in the world. It would seem that she’s observed Silicon Valley from every peak: she’s climbed every path and traversed all the terrain. But there is still one frontier left – and now, for the first time, Mayer is going there. She’s running her own startup.
Mayer has partnered with Enrique Munoz Torres to create Lumi Labs. Don’t get used to that term, though – one of Mayer’s first goals for this upcoming year is to change the name, which is only a placeholder before the think tank reveals what products it will create. Then, the products will dictate the title of the company. But for now, we know that Lumi Labs is working on Mayer’s first passion – a fascination that harkens all the way back to her days at Stanford: artificial intelligence.
Mayer aims to combine AI with the functionality of media tasks in an effort to make people’s lives “frictionless.” Lumi Labs is in its very early stages, even more nascent than when Mayer joined Google. With only twelve employees, Mayer and Torres are currently searching for new talent to hire. They’re impatient to grow, but taking the time to find the perfect team – an important aspect of Mayer’s hiring philosophy. “For an artist, you feel their mood and temperament in their work and I think the same is true in technology.” Finding hardworking, smart people whose kindness will translate into their work is one of Mayer’s specialties.
Mayer is now fostering her own company’s culture – and she has an expansive cache of experience to pull from. Although Google now boasts a reputation for having a friendly and empowering company culture, legend has it that in the beginning, Larry and Sergey were brusk to the point of rudeness and that shouting was commonplace in the office. But Mayer recalls that the leadership was only blunt to be efficient. “No one took offense at the fact that someone spent 2 minutes to explain why the answer was ‘no’ instead of 15 minutes.” There was no need to waste time on formalities because of the team’s common understanding that there’s a lot of work to be done and that’s not personal.
By the time Mayer headed the Geo and Maps division of Google, she was more than fluent in the culture and internal systems of the company. So when she made the jump to CEO of Yahoo, there was a big learning curve – not only was she new at the company, the company didn’t even know itself. “I was the 7th CEO in 61 months.” Unlike previous CEOs who immediately came in with a rollout plan that they pressed upon the company, Mayer chose to observe and get to know the many talented people at Yahoo. The employees were full of ideas that had been stifled under previous leadership. “You have to listen to the people who are there…I would go down to the cafeteria every day and just talk to the people.” She says she waited ninety days before enacting a plan for change, and much of her restructuring was focused on giving people a voice and platform for sharing their opinions.
At Lumi Labs, Mayer is proud of the culture that’s coming along, particularly that the company’s engineering team is made up of an even split of men and women. She hopes that this is the team that’s going to accomplish what everyone is Silicon Valley says they’re going to do – change the world. But, of course, there are plenty of AI critics that worry change may not be for the better.
Mayer is aware of the moral skepticism and hypothetical implications of AI, and although she agrees that it’s important to think things through, “it’s also important to realize where the state of the industry and the state of the art is today and acknowledge that we’re pretty far from that, at least from my vantage point.” And in fact, Mayer notes room for improvement in our daily lives – improvements that can be provided by applying AI to functional media tasks.
Besides, Mayer is used to naysayers. In 2000, Google had not yet been publicly traded when the so-called “internet bubble” burst. Mayer would often hear, both in passing and in the media, “the web is dead.” Tons of startups were shutting down, and Yahoo’s stock was plummeting. People truly believed that the days of the internet were over. And in certain ways, Google was indeed set back – they weren’t able to go public for six more years, highly unusual for the time. “In 1999, you were either going to go public in eighteen months to two years, or you weren’t going to.” But now, Mayer believes that when Google did eventually go public, they were a more stable and knowledgeable company and were therefore able to achieve more lucrative gains than if the sale would have happened immediately.
Obviously, the naysayers were wrong about the web. The internet is just getting started.
We think it’s safe to say the same about Marissa Mayer. Listen to our amazing podcast episode with Marissa here.
