Marissa Mayer is Turning the Tide at Yahoo!

Source: The Daily Beast

In just a few short months, Marissa Mayer has shown the world that she can play with the big dogs of the tech world. She is responsible for reinvigorating Yahoo! - a company that suffered a downward spiral caused mostly by strategic mistakes. Difficulty recruiting and retaining the right leadership prompted investors to deem Yahoo! a bearish stock, allowing Google and Facebook to eat up its market share.

Since Mayer took the seat as Yahoo!'s CEO in mid-July of 2012, however, the former Google executive has helped the company reach positive revenue growth for the first time in four years. She owes some of her success to her repertoire, but hopes to keep consumers on their feet with new initiatives every week. Her strategy moving forward includes returning $3 billion in cash to shareholders, assembling a capable executive team, and customizing content as well as taking advantage of mobile offerings.

Mayer graduated with honors from Stanford University with a B.S. in symbolic systems and a M.S. in computer science while specializing in artificial intelligence for both degrees. Marissa joined Google in 1999 and became the company's 20th hire and first female engineer. She held key roles as an engineer, designer, product manager, and executive, and had a hand in Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Books.

Marissa is opening doors for girls who are apprehensive in pursuing math or science related careers and aims to remove the stigma that these fields are a mens' club. The Oscar de le Renta and Armani wearing trailblazer dispels the myth that tech is only for coders with wide glasses and pocket protectors, proving geek can be chic also. The percentage of women engineers in Silicon Valley currently hovers around 16%, yet Marissa says in her experience, organizations value gender balance. Her impetus to enter tech were words of encouragement from her computer science professor and mentor Eric Roberts. He said, "You know what? You're really good at this. You could go far in this."

There is no doubt in my mind that Mayer will revolutionize Yahoo! into a company that rivals Google's if she can revamp Yahoo!'s image and differentiate the two. Providing consumers with services that Google lacks or in which it fails to provide a good user experience should be the point of attack. I will surely keep an eye on Mayer for her next move.