Marissa Mayer Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Marissa Mayer:
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.
~Marissa Mayer
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Search occupies this wonderful moment in a user's day where it doesn't even really break along demographics, right?
~Marissa Mayer
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I've always liked simplicity.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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Yahoo!, over the years, had been the king of the banner ad.
~Marissa Mayer
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I had to think really hard about how to choose between job offers.
~Marissa Mayer
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I don't believe in balance, not in the classic way.
~Marissa Mayer
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The internet creates more of an appetite for media - it doesn't replace physical books, radio or TV.
~Marissa Mayer
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With data collection, 'The sooner the better' is always the best answer.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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I was always good at math and science, and I never realized that that was unusual or somehow undesirable.
~Marissa Mayer
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If I had been more self-conscious about being a woman, it would have stifled me.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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For some people, what really matters to them is sleep.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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I refuse to be stereotyped.
~Marissa Mayer
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I really love color.
~Marissa Mayer
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Will the social networking phenomenon lessen? I don't think so.
~Marissa Mayer
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When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night.
~Marissa Mayer
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Employees, especially young people, want more than a paycheck.
~Marissa Mayer
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I like to stay in the rhythm of things.
~Marissa Mayer
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Geeks are people who love something so much that all the details matter.
~Marissa Mayer
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You can be good at technology and like fashion and art. You can be good at technology and be a jock. You can be good at technology and be a mom. You can do it your way, on your terms.
~Marissa Mayer
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I really wanted to be a doctor, until my freshman year of college when I realized that while I was good at chemistry and biology, I really wasn't feeling challenged by it.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.'
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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If you can find something that you're really passionate about, whether you're a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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When I came to Yahoo! in 2012, I came because I really wanted to work hard. I thought it was a great challenge.
~Marissa Mayer
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I like to stay in the rhythm of things. My maternity leave will be a few weeks long, and I'll work throughout it.
~Marissa Mayer
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Product management really is the fusion between technology, what engineers do - and the business side.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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I'm a geek.
~Marissa Mayer
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There are probably industries where gender is more of an issue, but our industry is not one where I think that's relevant.
~Marissa Mayer
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I had no idea how to eat sensibly.
~Marissa Mayer
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Really in technology, it's about the people, getting the best people, retaining them, nurturing a creative environment and helping to find a way to innovate.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.'
~Marissa Mayer
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I pace myself by taking a week-long vacation every four months.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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Search is an unsolved problem.
~Marissa Mayer
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Well, I think the social networking is really interesting.
~Marissa Mayer
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I like to get myself in over my head.
~Marissa Mayer
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I could imagine, some number of years from now, starting my own company. But not yet. Not for a while.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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I definitely think what drives technology companies is the people; because in a technology company it's always about what are you going to do next.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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I don't feel overwhelmed with information. I really like it.
~Marissa Mayer
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I didn't want to lose my sense of myself in my profession.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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Good students are good at all things.
~Marissa Mayer
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To me, speed is really about convenience.
~Marissa Mayer
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The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience.
~Marissa Mayer
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You can't have everything you want, but you can have the things that really matter to you.
~Marissa Mayer
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For many people, Google is the most important tool on the Web.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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I think that for me, it's God, family and Yahoo - in that order.
~Marissa Mayer
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I think like my dad, but I have a huge kinship with my mom.
~Marissa Mayer
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Walmart is an amazing story of entrepreneurship and, as one of the world's most powerful brands, touches millions of lives every day.
~Marissa Mayer
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I think it's very comforting for people to put me in a box. 'Oh, she's a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.'
~Marissa Mayer
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I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that's how you grow. When there's that moment of 'Wow, I'm not really sure I can do this,' and you push through those moments, that's when you have a breakthrough.
~Marissa Mayer
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I think that ultimately over time we really should strive for a place where most information is available online and is searchable.
~Marissa Mayer
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What you want, when you want it. As opposed to everything you could ever want, even when you don't.
~Marissa Mayer
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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?'
~Marissa Mayer
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Our theory is, if you need the user to tell you what you're selling, then you don't know what you're selling, and it's probably not going to be a good experience.
~Marissa Mayer
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It's really wonderful to work in an environment with a lot of smart people.
~Marissa Mayer
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I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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The thing that surprised me and really puzzled me is that the job is really fun. Yahoo is a really fun place to work.
~Marissa Mayer
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I was Google's first woman engineer.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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Shifting toward management meant greater responsibility and influence, but it also meant giving up programming day-to-day in my role, which was hard because it took me out of my comfort zone.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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Well, I have one of the best jobs in the world.
~Marissa Mayer
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When you need to innovate, you need collaboration.
~Marissa Mayer
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I really believe that the virtual world mirrors the physical world.
~Marissa Mayer
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I don't need much sleep.
~Marissa Mayer
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Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.
~Marissa Mayer
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I like to do matrices. One option per line, different facets for each column. Salary, location, happiness index, failure index, and all that.
~Marissa Mayer
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I love technology, and I don't think it's something that should divide along gender lines.
~Marissa Mayer
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I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you're giving up that makes you resentful.
~Marissa Mayer
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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.
~Marissa Mayer
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I didn't set out to be at the top of technology companies. I'm just geeky and shy, and I like to code.
~Marissa Mayer
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I want Yahoo to be the absolute best place to work, to have a fantastic culture.
~Marissa Mayer
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