In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Marissa Mayer, a titan businesswoman known for working at Google and being Yahoo’s current CEO, revealed a number of things.
These include:
- How before becoming Google’s 20th employee and first female engineer, she interviewed at the management and consulting firm McKinsey & Company, but chose Google because she believed she’d be able to wield more influence
- Her belief that giving people of the same level of intelligence the same information will lead to them formulating the same conclusions
- Her claim that she worked 140 hours a week while at Google. She explains that you had to “plan out when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.” She says that she can gauge the future success of startups based upon how hard the founders work.
- Her observations on the highly-fragmented nature of the internet, both on desktop and mobile
- Her justification as to why Yahoo’s sale to Verizon was a good thing— “it kills two birds with one stone”
- How she managed to raise her newborn son, while working long hours, shortly after joining Yahoo. She called her son and twin daughters “like winning the lottery.”
- Her viewpoint on being a mother: “there just entirely too much judgment over motherhood.”
- Her intentions to stay on board as CEO at Yahoo
- Her opposition to sticking rigidly to long-term plans as this can lead to lost opportunities
