Google’s first female engineer Marissa Mayer is back where she started
20/04/2018
NEW DELHI, Apr 19: Former Yahoo CEO (chief executive officer) Marissa Mayer on Wednesday announced her new venture Lumi Labs. While the startup sure is special for Mayer, what makes it extra precious is the fact that it brings with it copious amounts of nostalgia. It's a homecoming of sorts for her as Mayer has rented out Google's original office in Palo Alto, California, where she had started her career as a 24-year old Stanford University graduate.
The former Google office which is now the Lumi Labs' home is also where online payment system company PayPal was started by a host of co-founders including Tesla boss Elon Musk. " There is a lot of good juju here," said Mayer in an interview to the New York Times (NYT).
In 1999, Marissa Mayer got inducted into Google as the 20th employee and the first female engineer of the company. To add more perspective, Mayer was involved in the rolling out of key products of the search giant like Gmail, Google Maps and Google AdWords. In fact, Mayer's team on the Google AdWords project was a small three-person one, but the groundbreaking algorithm that linked advertisers' keywords to search results helped deliver 96 per cent of the company's $10.6 billion revenues in the first quarter of 2011.
After working at Google for 13 years, Mayer quit to take over the top job at Yahoo - once an internet behemoth whose fortunes were fledgling by the time Mayer joined in 2012. Ironically, it was Google and Facebook that hit Yahoo the worst, eating up majority of the ad revenues on the internet. In the NYT interview, when asked why she left Google for Yahoo, Mayer said, " I’d always had huge respect for Yahoo as a company...In 1999, Yahoo was the internet. And I knew that while there were a lot of things going wrong for the board and leadership at Yahoo, there were a lot of really good people there working on the products". She added that she wasn't sure of turning a '50-year-old search girl' at Google.
At Yahoo, Mayer had a tumultuous stint. The company tripled its market capitalisation during her stint and took over social networking website Tumblr in 2013, but eroding ad revenues meant that the company got sold off to US-based telecom company Verizon in 2017.
Mayer's latest venture Lumi Labs has been described as a 'tech incubator focused in the consumer media and artificial intelligence space', according to the LinkedIn profile of the startup's co-founder Enrique Munoz Torres.
Torres served as Senior Vice President, Advertising and Search at Yahoo. Mayer who has not divulged much about Lumi Labs told NYT: "In Finnish, lumi means snow, and I just love snow...We have some ideas in the consumer space. So I’ve been meeting with different founders and just seeing what’s happening in the industry."
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