Marissa Mayer

Former President & CEO, Yahoo!

Net worth: USD $430 million

No one would suspect that a little girl from Wausau, Wisconsin would grow up to be one of the most powerful women ever to work in the world of corporate business, and with great achievements. Marissa Mayeris the President and CEO of Yahoo and has been since July of 2012. She was born May 30, 1975, to Michael and Margaret Mayer. She was provided a hearty Midwest education that was well-rounded and included learning both piano and ballet.

Google

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 and was the company's first female engineer. She started out 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 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 AdWor ds, which is an algorithm used by advertisers to get insight into the products consumers want. AdWords helped deliver 96% of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2011.

Mayer held key roles in Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle, and Gmail.

Yahoo

On July 16, 2012, Mayer was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo!, effective the following day. She is also a member of the company's board of directors. To simplify the bureaucratic process and "make the culture the best version of itself", Mayer launched a new online program called PB&J. It collects employee complaints, as well as their votes on problems in the office; if a problem generates at least 50 votes, online management automatically investigates the matter. In February 2013, Mayer oversaw a major personnel policy change at Yahoo! that required all remote-working employees to convert to in-office roles. Having worked from home toward the end of her pregnancy, Mayer returned to work after giving birth to a boy, and built a mother's room next to her office suite—Mayer was consequently criticized for the telecommuting ban, in spite of the fact many remote employees were largely unavailable and unresponsive weeks at a time. In April 2013, Mayer changed Yahoo!'s maternity leave policy, lengthening its time allowance and providing a cash bonus to parents. CNN noted this was in line with other Silicon Valley companies, such as Facebook and Google. Mayer has been criticized for many of her management decisions in pieces by The New York Times and The New Yorker.

On May 20, 2013, Mayer led Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr in a $1.1 billion acquisition. In February 2016, Yahoo! acknowledged that the value of Tumblr had fallen by $230 million since it was acquired. In July 2013, Yahoo! reported a fall in revenues, but a rise in profits compared with the same period in the previous year. Reaction on Wall Street was muted, with shares falling 1.7%. In September 2013, it was reported that the stock price of Yahoo! had doubled over the 14 months since Mayer's appointment. However, much of this growth may be attributed to Yahoo!'s stake in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group, which was acquired before Mayer's tenure.

Boards and honors

As well as sitting on the boards of directors of Walmart and Jawbone, Mayer also sits on several non-profit boards such as Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mayer actively invests in technology companies, including crowd-sourced design retailer Minted, live video platform Airtime, wireless power startup uBeam, online DIY community/e-commerce company Brit + Co., mobile payments processor Square, home décor site One Kings Lane, genetic testing company Natera, and nootropics and biohacking company Nootrobox.

Mayer was named to Fortune magazine's annual list of America's 50 Most Powerful Women in Business in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 with ranks at 50, 44, 42, 38, 14 and 8 respectively. In 2008, at age 33, she was the youngest woman ever listed. Mayer was named one of Glamour Magazine's Women of the Year in 2009. She was listed in Forbes Magazine's List of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women in 2012, 2013 and 2014, with ranks of 20, 32 and 18 respectively. In September 2013, Mayer became the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to be featured in a Vogue magazine spread. In 2013, she was also named in the Time 100 and became the first woman listed as number one on Fortune magazine's annual list of the top 40 business stars under 40 years old. Mayer eventually made Fortune magazine history in 2013, as the only person to feature in all three of its annual lists during the same year: Businessperson of the Year (No. 10), Most Powerful Women (at No. 8), and 40 Under 40 (No. 1) at the same time. On 24 December 2015, Mayer was listed by UK-based company Richtopia at number 14 in the list of 500 Most Influential CEO's. In March 2016, in contrast, Fortune named Mayer as one of the world's most disappointing leaders.