Marissa Mayer Quotes

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.

I've always liked simplicity.

I had to think really hard about how to choose between job offers.

Straight lines don't exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms have at least a slight curve.

I love technology, and I don't think it's something that should divide along gender lines.

My maternity leave will be a few weeks long, and I'll work throughout it.

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.

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.

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.

Good students are good at all things.

For some people, what really matters to them is sleep.

With data collection, 'The sooner the better' is always the best answer.

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 was Google's first woman engineer.

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.

This is one of my favorites. People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: 'We know you said it was impossible, but we're going to do this, this, and that to get us there.'

Success is never getting to the bottom of your to-do list.

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.'

Innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision.

There are probably industries where gender is more of an issue, but our industry is not one where I think that's relevant.

I really love color.

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.

Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.

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.

I think like my dad, but I have a huge kinship with my mom.

When you need to innovate, you need collaboration.

I refuse to be stereotyped.

If I had been more self-conscious about being a woman, it would have stifled me.

I've come to realize that being a mother makes me a better executive, because motherhood forces prioritization. Being a mom gives you so much more clarity on what is important.

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.

It is wonderful to work in an environment with a lot of smart people. It challenges you to think and work on a different level. If you play with better players, you learn a lot: perspectives, intellectual arguments, new ways of thinking about things.

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?'

When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night.

The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience.

Search is an unsolved problem.

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.

Your rhythm is what matters to you so much that when you miss it you're resentful of your work ... So find your rhythm, understand what makes you resentful, and protect it..

Creativity thrives best when constrained.

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.'

I was always good at math and science, and I never realized that that was unusual or somehow undesirable.

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.

To me, the future is personalization .

For many people, Google is the most important tool on the Web.

There are amazing opportunities all over the world for women, and I think that there's more good that comes out of positive energy around that than negative energy.

I don't feel overwhelmed with information. I really like it.

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 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.

I love Google. I was there for 13 years, and if you told me I'd be as happy anywhere else, I would've probably doubted it. But I am as happy, if not happier, at Yahoo.

People are more productive when they're alone, but they're more collaborative and innovative when they're together.

I really believe that the virtual world mirrors the physical world.

If you push through that feeling of being scared, that feeling of taking risk, really amazing things can happen.

The thing that surprised me and really puzzled me is that the job is really fun. Yahoo is a really fun place to work.

You have to ruthlessly prioritize.

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 pace myself by taking a week-long vacation every four months.

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.

I think the most interesting thing is what happens next.

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.

I could imagine, some number of years from now, starting my own company. But not yet. Not for a while.

What is clear is that users own their data and should have control of how their data is used.

Search occupies this wonderful moment in a user's day where it doesn't even really break along demographics, right?

I like to stay in the rhythm of things.

I realized in all the cases where I was happy with the decision I made, there were two common threads: Surround myself with the smartest people who challenge you to think about things in new ways, and do something you are not ready to do so you can learn the most.

The internet creates more of an appetite for media - it doesn't replace physical books, radio or TV.

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 didn't set out to be at the top of technology companies. I'm just geeky and shy, and I like to code.

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.

People ask me all the time: 'What is it like to be a woman at Google?' I'm not a woman at Google, I'm a geek at Google. And being a geek is just great. I'm a geek, I like to code, I even like to use spreadsheets when I cook.

I didn't want to lose my sense of myself in my profession.

Well, I have one of the best jobs in the world.

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.

For me the core principles of privacy online are transparency, choice and control.

Pick something and make it great.

The prime reason the Google homepage is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact, it was noted that the SUBMIT button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

I think that ultimately over time we really should strive for a place where most information is available online and is searchable.

Well, I think the social networking is really interesting.

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.

Today, only about 1% of the World Wide Web is written in Arabic.