Marissa Mayer

Current Company

Sunshine — Co-Founder & CEO

Google's First Female Engineer

Marissa Mayer joined Google in 1999 as the company's 20th employee and first female engineer, working directly on the search engine's user interface, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google News. Over 13 years, she rose to Vice President overseeing some of Google's most important consumer products, earning a reputation for obsessive attention to design detail and data-driven decision making.

Mayer became one of Silicon Valley's most visible executives and a symbol of the tech industry's meritocratic ambitions. Her departure from Google to become CEO of Yahoo in 2012 was one of the most closely watched executive moves of the decade, as she attempted to revive the struggling internet pioneer.

From Yahoo to Sunshine

As Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer oversaw a $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, aggressive hiring of engineering talent, and efforts to modernize Yahoo's mobile and media offerings. While Yahoo's core business ultimately declined, her stewardship of Yahoo's investment in Alibaba proved enormously valuable for shareholders. Yahoo was acquired by Verizon in 2017.

After Yahoo, Mayer co-founded Sunshine, a consumer technology startup focused on AI-powered contact and event management. She remains one of the most accomplished product leaders in Silicon Valley history — a rare executive who operated at the highest levels of both a defining startup (Google) and a legacy internet company (Yahoo).