When the richest people in the world are considered, wealthy families usually come to mind. Because it’s hard to even save money, let alone make a fortune. For this reason, many organizations prepare lists of business people, even businesswomen, who make their own fortunes. Because women’s accumulation of great wealth in sectors such as technology and commerce is more unique to this century.
As difficult as it may be, Silicon Valley is full of stories of business people making their own fortune. Marissa Mayer is one of them… Her story has been and continues to be the subject of many articles such as “From Peak to Downfall”, “5 Lessons to be Learned from Mayer’s Mistakes”. Yes, “There was a Yahoo, what happened?” Behind the question lies Mayer’s mistakes, but few people know about his life. With her wealth of $760 million today, Mayer ranks 33rd on one of the aforementioned self-made businesswomen lists, namely “Forbes’s List of the Richest Self-Made Billionaire Women in the United States.” The list is made up of businesswomen who made their fortunes on their own, not inherited from family or elsewhere.
When Marissa Mayer took a job as Yahoo’s CEO in 2012, expectations were high. Because Mayer’s career held great promise that the internet giant, which had been in decline for many years, could be saved. Mayer, who started her career as Google’s first female engineer and 20th employee, ended her Yahoo adventure 5 years later because she could not prevent the decline in the company’s profits.
Mayer was accepted from 10 universities
Mayer’s story begins in 1975, in a small town called Wausau, in the US state of Wisconsin. Born to an engineer father and an art teacher mother, Mayer says he was introverted during his student years. It is known that Mayer, who showed a predisposition to mathematics and science during his school years, applied to 10 schools in the year he entered the university and was accepted to all of them. These schools include Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. The successful businesswoman starts her undergraduate education at Stanford with a degree in medicine, but her whole life changes when she takes an introductory computer science course. Mayer’s path begins to pass through many different places from now on.
Marissa Mayer speaking at an event at Google in 2010. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Mayer moves on to the Department of Symbolic Systems, which is only available at Stanford University. This is a school where LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman, Apple’s software development engineer Scott Forstall, and Instagram’s co-founder Mike Krieger have graduated.
When Mayer graduated with honors in 1997, he received 12 job offers. The last of these is Google, which was still in a small start-up phase at that time. Considering accepting the offer of McKinsey, one of the world’s leading management consulting companies, Mayer explains that he calculated that the probability of Google’s survival was 2 percent, but that he still started work here. She says she accepted the job because she loves the people she talks to at Google and anticipates that she can learn a lot here. Mayer worked at Google for 13 years.
Working 100 hours a week during his first years at Google, Mayer was also giving lectures at Stanford during the same period. Mayer quickly climbed the career ladder, becoming the name in charge of consumer products, including the company’s core research, in 2003. Along with his successes at Google, his value in Silicon Valley was increasing day by day. At the same time, she was on the cover of important magazines, she met with President Obama, and she was constantly on the agenda with her motherhood and CEO. The press was very good. There were even rumors that Google had set up a separate PR team just for Mayer. These rumors were not true, but it is known that the company has recruited Mayer to develop his career. Mayer gained attention when she started wearing the clothes of famous designers and buying houses in expensive parts of San Francisco.
Marissa Mayer started her own company
Mayer, who became CEO of Yahoo in 2012, has failed to maintain the company’s web traffic and stop the decline in profits. Marissa Mayer has announced her resignation after Yahoo was sold to Verizon for $4.45 billion for a security breach. There were calls for him to resign from Yahoo, where he had already come with great hopes, and negative news appeared in the press. In some of these news stories, he was frequently reminded of his power struggles with other important names at Google.
After Yahoo, Mayer founded an application called Sunshine that reminds simple tasks, and continues his life and work in Silicon Valley. With the help of artificial intelligence, Sunshine comprehensively updates the information of the contacts and cleans up the redundancy.
Sources: Insider, Forbes, CNBC
