25 surprising facts about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

New Delhi: Young, powerful, rich, and brilliant, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is a role model for millions of women. Now 38 years old, she is a wife, a mother, an engineer, and the chief executive of a $30 billion Yahoo, a woman in an industry dominated by men.It has been a year since Marissa Mayer assumed command of Yahoo, and there's no doubt that she's injected the much required energy into the purple-hued Internet pioneer. Mayer has revamped many of Yahoo's core products, like Flickr, embarked on an ambitious acquisition spree — including the blockbuster $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr — and returned hundreds of millions of dollars to shareholders. Perhaps most important, Mayer has rejuvenated esprit de corps among the company's long-suffering employees.Given the bad shape Yahoo was in when Mayer took over as CEO, her most important accomplishment has been to get people talking positively about Yahoo again. Mayer has been pushing Yahoo's developers and designers to make improvements to the Sunnyvale, California-based company's products and services since she was hired in July of last year from Google. She revamped the home page, e-mail and weather services with sleeker designs and other improvements. Moreover, the company's stock price is up 100 per cent and engineers wanted to work for Yahoo again. More users will lead to better financial results, she said in July. Recently, ComScore Inc. announced that over 196 million Web users spent time on the largest U.S. Web portal's sites during the month, up 21 per cent from a year earlier.From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, there are people hoping for her success at Yahoo top spot. Despite her grueling work habits, Mayer describes her success as almost effortless. Let's take a look at 25 interesting facts about her life and career: She was a shy studentFrom her early childhood days to her first year at Yahoo, Mayer was a shy and socially awkward person. She describes the child and teenage version of herself as "painfully shy."Hers was a middle-class upbringing She went to public schools and worked a summer job as a grocery clerk, but her family had enough time and money to enroll her in countless activities.A “pompom” girlGrowing up in Wisconsin, she took piano lessons. She played volleyball and basketball. She went to swimming and skiing lessons. She also liked ice sport, debating, ballet and “precision dance.” She took ballet for as many as 35 hours a week during middle school and high school. Her mother says ballet taught her "criticism and discipline, poise and confidence." In high school Mayer was also on the curling team. She was a "pompom" girl and a debater.She got accepted to all 10 schools she applied In 1993, Mayer applied to, and was accepted into, 10 schools, including Harvard, Yale, Duke, and Northwestern. To decide which one she would go to, Mayer created a spreadsheet, weighing variables for each. And she picked Stanford. Her plan was to become a brain doctor - a profession that doesn't draw much on the leadership traits Mayer was quickly developing.Teaching was her callingMayer went to Stanford and began taking pre-med classes. She planned to become a doctor. However, by the end of her freshman year, she was sick of it. She was looking for a major "that can really make her think” - that would train her to "think critically, and become a great problem-solver." She also wanted to "study how people think, how they reason, how they express themselves."Engrossed by the challenge of programmingMayer took an introductory computer science class: CS105. She was engrossed by the challenge of programming - taking a problem and using her mind to solve it. In a design contest, she made a screensaver that featured exploding fireworks. In a class of 300, Mayer came in second. Impressed by her design, her CS105 professor, Eric Roberts, invited her and a few other top finishers over for dinner at his house. He became her mentor, as once again, Mayer bonded with a teacher.Chose symbolic systems majorMayer had also found her major, opting for symbolic systems - a combination of linguistics, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and computer science classes.Wasn't a socialite in her college daysOne Stanford classmate said Mayer was so shy that she would do her work and then leave. “When other people would stay and hang out and have pizza, she'd just be out of there because the work is done." One person who lived in her dorm said she appeared to always be "down to business" and "not much for socialising"."She wasn't one of those people into making new friends around the dorm. She was always doing something more important than just chilling."Choose GoogleAt her last year at Stanford, she already had 12 job offers to choose from, and wasn't looking for any more hard choices. In 1999, after her interview for a job at Google, the company's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, offered Mayer a job and she considered it. She became a product manager at the young start-up after turning down a teaching job at Carnegie Mellon University.Dated Larry PageShe dated Larry Page. Mayer and the Google co-founder, dated in the early 2000s, according to the book "Googled" by Ken Auletta.Mayer as a motivatorMayer is known to invite her employees to help build the brand. Mayer adopted a concept from her days at Stanford—office hours. For about 90 minutes a day, beginning at 4:00 pm, Mayer used to hold office hours at Google. Employees would add their name to a board outside her office and, on a first-come basis, would get a few minutes of her time. These interactions were held outside of the longer, regularly scheduled meetings. These meetings gave the opportunity to her subordinates to give feedback on projects or to pitch ideas. Mayer said many of Google's most popular features got their start during office hours. Climbed the corporate ladder easilyMayer joined Google as a programmer and rose to become the executive in charge of the way Google search and many other popular Google products looked to web users. She became a senior vice-president, with thousands of Google employees reporting to her and hundreds of millions of people around the world using products she helped build.Worked 100 hours a weekDuring her first two years at Google, she worked 100 hours a week as a programmer. During her first several years at Google, Mayer had been able to continue teaching at Stanford. She taught 3000 undergraduates by the time she was promoted.Carried an iPhone at Google She carried an iPhone at Google, maker of Android phones, because so did most mobile web users.Obsessed with data-driven designMayer was obsessed with data-driven design. Although this gave her some critics, it also made her one of the internet's most effective design and product development leaders during her years at Google. People at Google credit her with the success of not just Google search, but also many others, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google News.Got demoted at GoogleHer attention to detail may have been too much for even Google to handle. In an unauthorised biography of Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, Business Insider journalist writes that though Mayer did extremely well at Google where she designed its homepage, created its product management structure and "became the face of the company", she was demoted between 2010-2012 due to public disagreements with colleagues.Is instrumental in Yahoo's turnaroundAfter joining Yahoo, a major challenge for Mayer was to pump new energy into the purple-hued Internet pioneer. Mayer has revamped many of Yahoo's core products, like Flickr, and has embarked on an ambitious acquisition spree — including the blockbuster $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr — and returned hundreds of millions of dollars to shareholders. Under her leadership, Yahoo also topped Google as the most-visited website in the United States in July. Yahoo received 196.6 million unique visitors during the month, compared with 192.3 million for Google. This was for the first time Yahoo has found itself in the top spot for U.S. Web traffic since May 2011. Yahoo's traffic does not include data from Tumblr, acquired by Yahoo earlier this year for $1 billion, says comScore.The first ever pregnant CEO of a Fortune 500 tech companyMayer soon after being appointed as the new CEO of Yahoo, announced that she was pregnant and she expected her first child in October 2012. She gave the news exclusively to Fortune, but the word starting spreading like wildfire seconds after it went public. She set a precedent as the first woman to ever take the top position while pregnant. And, in late September, when she had her first child, she only took a couple weeks off for maternity leave. Yahoo! announced that Mayer is working from home this week but she may reappear in the office in person after only a week of maternity leave. The self-described geek prompted much debate about how pregnancies affect women in the workplace. However, in a striking announcement, Mayer demanded that all remote employees report to office facilities by June 1. Her decision elicited a flood of opinion from both sides—those who agree with CEO Marissa Mayer and Yahoo's HR chief that “communication and collaboration” are required for innovation to flourish and others who say Yahoo's ban on working from home is a throwback to the stone age.Has a fly penthouse It's atop the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, and it's worth a cool $5 million, according to The New York Times.Likes cupcakesMayer likes them so much that the Google exec once created a spreadsheet to maintain a detailed record of the ingredients that go into her favorites.A fashionista Mayer is obsessed with fashion. According to the Los Angeles Times, Mayer once paid $60,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with fashion designer Oscar de la Renta. Recently Mayer graced the pages of Vogue in a revealing profile titled "Yahoo's Marissa Mayer: Hail to the Chief."