Page had taken over the running of Google’s day-to-day operations from Eric Schmidt, the company’s longtime CEO, in April 2011, and immediately launched a major renovation of the company’s structure and priorities. Mayer was bruised in that reshuffling. For about a dozen years she had presided over “search”—which is to say everything the user saw, felt, and experienced when navigating Google—but now she was shunted away from that core business and put in charge of “local”—maps, restaurant recommendations, and the like. This was arguably a demotion and at best a lateral move. And when Page overhauled the operating committee, or “OC,” Mayer’s reduced status was made both explicit and public. The committee was renamed “the L-Team,” after the boss, and he pushed Mayer off in order to make room for a handful of others, including Android and YouTube masterminds Andy Rubin and Salar Kamangar. “She was not included,” says her friend Dylan Casey, who left Google last year. The L-Team is Google’s Sanhedrin, a group of insiders that decides strategy and vets acquisitions. If you’re on it, you have a hand in shaping Google’s future—and, therefore, the future of global technology. If you’re not—well then, you have Google on your résumé and a net worth estimated at $300 million.
Mayer was not happy, according to people who know her. “Marissa is very, very, very driven,” says Brian Singerman, a former Googler who is now a partner at Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm. But at the office, she kept her cool. “She was a trooper,” is how someone familiar with the situation described her. “She worked through it.”
Google loyalists said the move was part of the reorg, plain and simple. “That was what Larry thought was best for the company,” says Casey. Others said it was political, a punishment for Mayer’s inability to play nicely with other VIP Googlers, and bloggers began to wring their hands anew over the larger question of sexism in tech. Two other people removed from the L-Team were also women; one of them, Shona Brown, who ran business operations, “is a freaking Rhodes scholar,” says a former Googler, “another one of these rock stars.”
Then there was the delicate matter of Mayer’s public but never widely reported relationship with Page. (“Most local journalists know the gossip, relish it,” vented Nick Denton on Gawker in 2006, but “wouldn’t dream of working it into an article,” so anxious are they to protect their access to Google’s top tier.) Although some of Mayer’s former colleagues insist the affair had no bearing on their friend’s corporate profile, others disagree, pointing to the hard facts: Under Schmidt, Mayer was on the committee; under Page, she was booted off. “It’s got to have some impact,” says Dave McClure, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who knows Mayer slightly. “It gave her access to strategy and thinking at the highest levels. And it probably made it more difficult for her to advance. I don’t know too many other senior female executives who went out with the CEO who were still there after they stopped going out.” Page got married in 2007. Two years later, Mayer married the investor and lawyer Zachary Bogue.
She may have been stymied at Google, but Mayer, at 37, was already one of the most visible tech personalities in Silicon Valley. “She is, for all intents and purposes, famous,” says Casey. She was popular with the press for her accessibility in an industry notorious for its reclusive, or stammering, geniuses. She threw parties at her penthouse atop The Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco, to which everyone yearned to be invited. And throughout Silicon Valley and among the groupies drawn to its idiosyncratic nerd glamour, she was as well known for her hobbies—notably a taste for high-end fashion and a large collection of Dale Chihuly handblown glass—as she was for her tech cred. In a world still struggling to leave behind that age-old bias—girls can’t do math—Mayer was everyone’s favorite exception, fully girl and fully geek, a former ballet dancer who stayed up all night writing code. And one who seemed driven to make her own path when the men around her wouldn’t oblige. Frustrated at Google, she did what any strategically savvy executive in her place would do. She publicly shored up her brand while privately contemplating her next move. She tweeted her whereabouts from Davos and Vail as she kept things going at work (notably, overseeing the acquisition of Zagat listings). She got herself a seat on the board at Walmart. And she checked a big item off her Life List, one that might have been a professional obstacle for another kind of woman: She got pregnant.
Now, less than a year after news of her being sidelined at Google, Mayer arrives at two auspicious milestones virtually at once. Twelve weeks ago, she was named president and chief executive officer of Yahoo Inc., making her one of twenty female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and the only one to take the job while pregnant. At Yahoo, Mayer has her work cut out for her. Yahoo is a foundering brand suffering from a dramatic talent drain and years of chaos on its board and in its upper ranks. Its second-quarter results were grim, with U.S. search queries down 17 percent from a year ago and time spent on its content pages down 10 percent. The Yahoo stock price has been bumping along all year between $14 and $17 a share, about half of what it was five years ago. Mayer has to turn this around—and fast.
And last week, on September 30 at 10:22 p.m., her first child was born, a boy, weighing nearly nine pounds. “Name TBD,” she wrote in an e-mail she sent to a large circle of friends. “Suggestions welcome!” The e-mail was signed, “With love and happiness, Marissa & Zack.” It is, perhaps, a blessing that she doesn’t think much, she has said, of the high-achieving mother’s mantra, “balance.”
In celebration of the new arrival, Mayer’s friend Craig Silverstein, Google employee No. 1, who also left the company this year, is thinking about building Mayer a homemade diaper cake: three tiers of diapers in three different sizes, stacked around an empty cardboard tube and decorated all over with toys, onesies, and burp clothes. Mayer has made them for many of her friends’ babies and once showed him how, Silverstein says. “She had a whole recipe. She helped me make one. We went to five different places to get the right toys. You spend all night putting it together.” At the tippy top, Mayer likes to put a plush toy octopus. Silverstein calls the diaper cake “the perfect Marissa baby present”: “It has usability at its core.”
by Lisa Miller, The Cut, NY Magazine | Read more:
