Marissa Mayer has long been an inspiration to innovative women fighting to break gender barriers in a male-dominated technology industry.
After graduating from Stanford University, Mayer joined Google in 1999, when the Internet search giant was still a startup, and went on to design groundbreaking products like Gmail. She left Google in 2012 to become CEO of Yahoo, in a failed attempt to turn around the fading internet pioneer. But Mayer still managed to triple Yahoo’s stock price and create more than $30 billion in shareholder wealth before selling the company’s online business to Verizon Communications in 2017.
Mayer, 48, now co-leads an artificial intelligence startup called Sunshine with Enrique Muñoz Torres — a former colleague at Google and Yahoo — from an office in Palo Alto, California that served as Facebook’s first headquarters in Silicon Valley. She recently interviewed with The Associated Press.
A: Our thesis for the company is that there are just a lot of mundane tasks that get in your way. It goes for a lot of things: contacts, calendars, scheduling, all those different components cause a lot of friction. We think that by applying AI – not necessarily in cutting-edge ways – you can both solve valuable problems and give people time back. You can also increase their trust in AI.
A: After you install it on your iPhone or Android phone, we will look at your contacts. Then you can attach it to your email and we’ll go through to see if we can identify the signature blocks and who you often correspond back and forth with. If it looks like you’re actually having a conversation, we’ll add that person to your contacts. If you like the way we handle your contacts, for a monthly fee of $4.99 we can go to places like LinkedIn and add things that you might not have added yourself.
A: It’s a very powerful technology and when you have a powerful technology, things can go wrong. The powers are great, but they also introduce a whole new level of security concern. My fears are somewhat different than some people who worry about AI overlords and things like that. Mine is that we are getting closer to technologies that approach human intelligence.
When you have a machine that is almost as intelligent as humans, the likelihood that humans will eventually be fooled that it is real – that it is not a machine – only increases. When you have people who can no longer tell what is real and what is authentic, because machine intelligence is now approaching human intelligence, that is really the biggest risk.
A: There have been steps forward and steps back. I think women’s representation in leadership at the vice president and director levels is improving across companies. So it feels like things are improving. Probably not as quickly as I would like, but steps have been taken in the right direction.
A: I wasn’t trying to make a broad statement about the work-from-home policy at the time. I was just being blatantly honest. The company was in trouble and had been in trouble for quite some time. It was a turnaround. Somewhere on the order of 1% of (Yahoo) employees were on official work-from-home status, but when I got there, 10% of employees were working from home informally when they felt like it. And they didn’t have a great setup and it showed in their productivity.
I think it’s very difficult to join an organization that is completely remote because that idea of culture is lost – things like how to grow management, leadership, vision, the ability to bring people together around a product in one get aligned and plan around what you’re trying to build. .
A: I follow Yahoo. The old saying is that you bleed purple (the color of the old company logo) once you work there, and that’s true. I’m very proud of the people who are still there and I’m very proud of the people who have left and gone on to do great things in the industry. I still feel very connected to them.
—-
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.