Top 45 Marissa Mayer Quotes

The interesting thing is when you look at what people want to do on their phone, it’s mail, weather, check stock quotes and news. That’s Yahoo’s business. This is a huge opportunity for us because we have the content and all the information people want on their phones.

Our theory is, if you need the user to tell you what you’re selling, then you don’t know what you’re selling, and it’s probably not going to be a good experience.

If I had been more self-conscious about being a woman, it would have stifled me.

When you need to innovate, you need collaboration.

Communications is the biggest driver of frequency of use of anything. Think about how many times a day you check your email on your phone or text someone or message someone.

I think what’s really amazing is that given the scale of the web and getting the compute power we have today, we’re starting to see things that appear intelligent but actually aren’t semantically intelligent.

Employees, especially young people, want more than a paycheck.

I think, you know, a fellow CEO said to me that the interesting thing about being CEO that’s really striking is that you have very few decisions that you need to make, and you need to make them absolutely perfectly.

Geeks are people who love something so much that all the details matter.

If you can find something that you’re really passionate about, whether you’re a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force.

I took a computer-science course to fill a prerequisite at Stanford, and I realized that every day was a new problem, and every day you got to think about how to solve something new, how to reason through something new, how to develop an algorithm to solve for something you hadn’t worked on before.

Our mission is making the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining. Which people come to work at Yahoo to build on that mission? Those who are inspired by that, and you can feel that passion in the products.

When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night.

Shifting toward management meant greater responsibility and influence, but it also meant giving up programming day-to-day in my role, which was hard because it took me out of my comfort zone.

One of the interesting applications of symbolic systems is artificial intelligence, and I spent some time thinking about how to create a brain that operates the way ours does.

I think it’s very comforting for people to put me in a box. ‘Oh, she’s a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.’

I love technology, and I don’t think it’s something that should divide along gender lines.

It’s really wonderful to work in an environment with a lot of smart people.

I think that for me, it’s God, family and Yahoo – in that order.

I don’t feel overwhelmed with information. I really like it.

Yahoo!, over the years, had been the king of the banner ad.

Eric Schmidt from Google is one of my favorite mentors. And Eric would always say this very humbling thing that’s really true, which is, he would say, ‘Good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually do things.’

Will the social networking phenomenon lessen? I don’t think so.

I pace myself by taking a week-long vacation every four months.

I refuse to be stereotyped.

I think that burnout happens because of resentment. That notion that, ‘Wow, I worked 100 hours last week, and I couldn’t even have this thing that I really wanted.’

I like to do matrices. One option per line, different facets for each column. Salary, location, happiness index, failure index, and all that.

The thing that surprised me and really puzzled me is that the job is really fun. Yahoo is a really fun place to work.

Really in technology, it’s about the people, getting the best people, retaining them, nurturing a creative environment and helping to find a way to innovate.

Product management really is the fusion between technology, what engineers do – and the business side.

Walmart is an amazing story of entrepreneurship and, as one of the world’s most powerful brands, touches millions of lives every day.

Search occupies this wonderful moment in a user’s day where it doesn’t even really break along demographics, right?

I’ve always liked simplicity.

I think that ultimately over time we really should strive for a place where most information is available online and is searchable.

For many people, Google is the most important tool on the Web.

I think that there is a generational change, where new generations that have grown up always having access to the internet have a somewhat different view in terms of personal information and what needs to be kept private.

You can’t have everything you want, but you can have the things that really matter to you.

Good students are good at all things.

The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience.

I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you’re giving up that makes you resentful.

I really believe that the virtual world mirrors the physical world.

I don’t believe in balance, not in the classic way.

I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere.

I like to get myself in over my head.

Before Google, I spent the summer building a program that would look at what websites you would go to and what websites other people would go to – and built a collaborative filtering program that helped you find related sites to look at.