But a glittering surface often deflects attention from a messier reality, and that’s true with Mayer and Yahoo. No one wants to sound as if they aren’t rooting for Yahoo or for her, and because Mayer didn’t cooperate for this article, even her friends were often unwilling to speak on the record about her. She’s anything but easy to categorize, in ways that are both interesting and possibly troubling for Yahoo’s future. “She is a confusing person,” says someone who has worked with her closely. “It is a mistake to paint her as an angel or as a devil.” Another executive who worked with her agrees that she is a hard person to understand. “There are some parts of Marissa World that are just inexplicably weird,” he says. “It doesn’t add up.”
There are two things about Marissa Mayer upon which everyone agrees. One is that she’s among the smartest people they’ve ever met. The other is that she has a superhuman capacity for work. Mayer says that she needs only four hours of sleep a night and that she pulled 250 all-nighters in her first five years at Google. “I don’t really believe in burnout,” she said in a speech last year at New York’s 92nd Street Y. “A lot of people work really hard for decades and decades, like Winston Churchill and Einstein.”
This superhuman energy seems to have been part of her from her earliest years in Wausau, a small city northwest of Milwaukee that is best known for the insurance company that carries its name. She told Vogue that she always had at least one after-school activity per day, from ballet to ice-skating, to piano, swimming, debate team, and Brownies; she was a standout debater whose team won a Wisconsin state championship, a member of the pom-pom squad, the president of the Spanish Club, and the treasurer of the Key Club; she has also said that by junior high she was doing ballet 35 hours a week.
At a talk at Stanford, when Mayer was asked what made her successful, her answer was simple: “I like to work.” She went on to say that, when her father, who was an environmental engineer, came to a talk she was giving at Google, people swarmed him to ask about his daughter. When they asked, “Have you ever seen Marissa talk before?,” he answered, “No. I’m Marissa’s dad. I like to work.”
Mayer doesn’t seem to have been a popular kid, but she shows no signs of having been tormented in the usual ways that smart, small-town midwestern girls can be. “I got to live in a bubble,” she said at the Y. “I was really good at chemistry, calculus, biology, physics in high school, and my teachers were genuinely supportive of that.” Wausau West yearbook photos show her in a science seminar discussing the Wausau Chamber of Commerce survey on students and working hours, performing a pom-pom routine for a Bush-Quayle rally, and, on the debate team, telling a judge why voting rights for the homeless weren’t needed. (The yearbook had a feature describing debaters as “nerds with attitude.”)
If she had any insecurities, Mayer didn’t manifest them outwardly. “In high school, Marissa was wicked smart and she knew it (not cocky, but very confident)” is how Lief Larson, who went to high school with her and is now a technology entrepreneur in Minneapolis, described her in a blog post. “She was always 100% business, all the time. She was not known as a ‘popular,’ but she was highly involved/diligent.” Larson added, “What ever she did, she tried to make it perfect.”
She applied to 10 colleges, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. After being accepted by all of them, she created a spreadsheet, ranking the schools by criteria such as median S.A.T. scores. It yielded Stanford, where she initially planned to major in biology or chemistry, with the goal of becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon “who taught at a medical school while taking exceptional cases,” as she described it. Upon realizing that she could do that with a degree from a state school, she changed her major to symbolic systems, a Stanford major that combines philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science.
Image: Darcy Padilla/Agence VU This superhuman energy seems to have been part of her from her earliest years in Wausau, a small city northwest of Milwaukee that is best known for the insurance company that carries its name. She told Vogue that she always had at least one after-school activity per day, from ballet to ice-skating, to piano, swimming, debate team, and Brownies; she was a standout debater whose team won a Wisconsin state championship, a member of the pom-pom squad, the president of the Spanish Club, and the treasurer of the Key Club; she has also said that by junior high she was doing ballet 35 hours a week.
At a talk at Stanford, when Mayer was asked what made her successful, her answer was simple: “I like to work.” She went on to say that, when her father, who was an environmental engineer, came to a talk she was giving at Google, people swarmed him to ask about his daughter. When they asked, “Have you ever seen Marissa talk before?,” he answered, “No. I’m Marissa’s dad. I like to work.”
Mayer doesn’t seem to have been a popular kid, but she shows no signs of having been tormented in the usual ways that smart, small-town midwestern girls can be. “I got to live in a bubble,” she said at the Y. “I was really good at chemistry, calculus, biology, physics in high school, and my teachers were genuinely supportive of that.” Wausau West yearbook photos show her in a science seminar discussing the Wausau Chamber of Commerce survey on students and working hours, performing a pom-pom routine for a Bush-Quayle rally, and, on the debate team, telling a judge why voting rights for the homeless weren’t needed. (The yearbook had a feature describing debaters as “nerds with attitude.”)
If she had any insecurities, Mayer didn’t manifest them outwardly. “In high school, Marissa was wicked smart and she knew it (not cocky, but very confident)” is how Lief Larson, who went to high school with her and is now a technology entrepreneur in Minneapolis, described her in a blog post. “She was always 100% business, all the time. She was not known as a ‘popular,’ but she was highly involved/diligent.” Larson added, “What ever she did, she tried to make it perfect.”
She applied to 10 colleges, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. After being accepted by all of them, she created a spreadsheet, ranking the schools by criteria such as median S.A.T. scores. It yielded Stanford, where she initially planned to major in biology or chemistry, with the goal of becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon “who taught at a medical school while taking exceptional cases,” as she described it. Upon realizing that she could do that with a degree from a state school, she changed her major to symbolic systems, a Stanford major that combines philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science.
by Bethany McLean, Vanity Fair | Read more:
