Monday, March 3, 2008

Marissa Mayer in San Francisco Magazine

Julian Guthrie wrote a piece for San Francisco magazine about Google’s Marissa Ann Mayer (note the article is already some days old). Here are some bits about Marissa, according to the piece:

• Marissa originally was Google’s first female developer, and 20th employee overall; she’s now 32 years old and vice president of search products and user experience
• she manages 150 managers, who in turn direct almost 2,000 developers
• has a $5 million, 38th-floor penthouse at the Four Seasons
• loves the color purple; likes to drink Mountain Dew and eat macaroni and cheese with lobster; 12 is her lucky number
• once dated Larry Page; had a series of long-term relationships, and is dating
• has a pet dog robot of the Aibo series named Rover
• grew up in Wausau, Wisconsin
• has apparently photographic memory, can come off as arrogant, is very competitive (Valleywag also cites dislike from an anonymous letter, but it might be best to take both praise and bashing with a grain of salt)
• put up some art in her place, like original works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein; she says “I’m a businesswoman first and foremost ... My hobbies actually make me better at work.”
• has approached different designers, like Will Wright, Oscar de la Renta and Todd Oldham, for an upcoming “Designer Themes for Google” project
• article alleges, fairy-tale style, that Marissa originally wanted to delete the job offer from 1999 with the subject “Work at Google?”, but then accidentally hit the space bar and it opened up the mail
• when Google signed a deal with Netscape to be Netscape’s default search engine, with 300 servers at the time, they asked that Netscape only send 1 out of 5 queries. Netscape instead sent all their traffic, and Google went down.
• in the beginning at Google, Marissa used search engine InfoSeek, but tried not to do so openly
• she gets to see lots of fast-paced product presentations which she then criticizes; thinks people should be using ticking clocks or progress bars instead of circles (like these circles, perhaps) to indicate progress in an application
• might reflect and ponder change when she hits the 10-years mark of working at Google, but has no immediate plans of leaving the company

[Thanks Brinke Guthrie!]

Marissa Mayer in San Fran ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (6+6)

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