Marissa Ann Mayer (born May 30, 1975) is an American businesswoman and investor. She is an information technology executive and co-founder of Lumi Labs. Mayer formerly served as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo!, held from July 2012. It was announced in January 2017 that she would step down from the company's board upon the sale of Yahoo!'s operating business to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion.
She would not join the newly combined company, now called Verizon Media (formerly Oath), and announced her resignation on June 13, 2017. She graduated from Stanford University and was a long-time executive, usability leader, and key spokeswoman for Google (employee #20).
After graduating from Stanford, Mayer received 14 job offers, including a teaching job at Carnegie Mellon University and a consulting job at McKinsey & Company. She joined Google in 1999 as employee number 20. She started writing code and overseeing small teams of engineers, developing and designing Google's search offerings. She became known for her attention to detail, which helped land her a promotion to product manager, and later she became director of consumer web products. She oversaw the layout of Google's well-known, unadorned search homepage. She was also on the three-person team responsible for Google AdWords. This advertising platform allows businesses to show their product to relevant potential customers based on their search terms. AdWords helped deliver 96% of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2011.