The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be.
— Marissa Mayer
I'm a geek.
Before Google, I spent the summer building a program that would look at what websites you would go to and what websites other people would go to - and built a collaborative filtering program that helped you find related sites to look at.
I want Yahoo to be the absolute best place to work, to have a fantastic culture.
Management is defense. You basically say, 'This is the direction; this is where we're heading,' and then it's my job to get everything else out of the way. All the other things that can become a distraction keep us from executing well. Get those out of the way, because the team ultimately needs to run in that direction and execute well.
There are probably industries where gender is more of an issue, but our industry is not one where I think that's relevant.
I think like my dad, but I have a huge kinship with my mom.
Eric Schmidt from Google is one of my favorite mentors. And Eric would always say this very humbling thing that's really true, which is, he would say, 'Good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually do things.'
My first week at Stanford, I bought a computer, and it was the first computer I ever owned. I had to be taught how to turn it on and even how to use a mouse, even though, for a lot of people, a mouse is very intuitive.
The turning point for me was realizing that I would learn more at Google, trying to build a company, regardless of whether we failed or succeeded, than I would at any of the other companies I had offers from.
When I came to Yahoo! in 2012, I came because I really wanted to work hard. I thought it was a great challenge.
I think that there is a generational change, where new generations that have grown up always having access to the internet have a somewhat different view in terms of personal information and what needs to be kept private.
I don't need much sleep.
Product management really is the fusion between technology, what engineers do - and the business side.
I don't think that I would consider myself a feminist. I think that I certainly believe in equal rights, I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so in a lot of different dimensions, but I don't, I think have, sort of, the militant drive and the sort of, the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that.
To me, speed is really about convenience.
For many people, Google is the most important tool on the Web.
I think that burnout happens because of resentment. That notion that, 'Wow, I worked 100 hours last week, and I couldn't even have this thing that I really wanted.'
I like to stay in the rhythm of things. My maternity leave will be a few weeks long, and I'll work throughout it.
One of the interesting applications of symbolic systems is artificial intelligence, and I spent some time thinking about how to create a brain that operates the way ours does.
The interesting thing is when you look at what people want to do on their phone, it's mail, weather, check stock quotes and news. That's Yahoo's business. This is a huge opportunity for us because we have the content and all the information people want on their phones.
When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'
I didn't set out to be at the top of technology companies. I'm just geeky and shy, and I like to code.
I really like even numbers, and I like heavily divisible numbers. Twelve is my lucky number - I just love how divisible it is. I don't like odd numbers, and I really don't like primes. When I turned 37, I put on a strong face, but I was not looking forward to 37. But 37 turned out to be a pretty amazing year.
Blackberry is a great product and really useful. But I think that Yahoo!'s future is going to be rooted in mobile apps. And we know that we need to have apps on some of the core platforms, and so iOS and Android, probably the two most important platforms for us.
I took a computer-science course to fill a prerequisite at Stanford, and I realized that every day was a new problem, and every day you got to think about how to solve something new, how to reason through something new, how to develop an algorithm to solve for something you hadn't worked on before.
Communications is the biggest driver of frequency of use of anything. Think about how many times a day you check your email on your phone or text someone or message someone.
I think what's really amazing is that given the scale of the web and getting the compute power we have today, we're starting to see things that appear intelligent but actually aren't semantically intelligent.
I could imagine, some number of years from now, starting my own company. But not yet. Not for a while.
The internet creates more of an appetite for media - it doesn't replace physical books, radio or TV.
Search occupies this wonderful moment in a user's day where it doesn't even really break along demographics, right?
If I had been more self-conscious about being a woman, it would have stifled me.
Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.
I had no idea how to eat sensibly.
I like to do matrices. One option per line, different facets for each column. Salary, location, happiness index, failure index, and all that.
I came in as an engineer and worked on artificial intelligence at Google. I worked on related sites and matching advertising to queries with some of our earliest ads.
I loved Stanford and symbolic systems. For me, I came to Stanford assuming I would be a doctor and got really deep into chemistry and biology, but I noticed everyone who was on the same track as me was taking the exact same classes. I wanted to do something more unique.
I think that for me, it's God, family and Yahoo - in that order.
Our mission is making the world's daily habits inspiring and entertaining. Which people come to work at Yahoo to build on that mission? Those who are inspired by that, and you can feel that passion in the products.
It was a very well-rounded childhood with lots of different opportunities. My mom will say she set out to overstimulate me - surround me with way too many things and let me pick. As a result, I've always been a multitasker; I've always liked a lot of variety.
When you need to innovate, you need collaboration.
I think, you know, a fellow CEO said to me that the interesting thing about being CEO that's really striking is that you have very few decisions that you need to make, and you need to make them absolutely perfectly.
The thing that surprised me and really puzzled me is that the job is really fun. Yahoo is a really fun place to work.
Yahoo!, over the years, had been the king of the banner ad.
I think that ultimately over time we really should strive for a place where most information is available online and is searchable.
Will the social networking phenomenon lessen? I don't think so.
Well, I think the social networking is really interesting.
Well, I have one of the best jobs in the world.
I don't believe in balance, not in the classic way.
For some people, what really matters to them is sleep.
