Valleywag
The only shocker in Julian Guthrie's profile of Marissa Mayer for San Francisco magazine: That the "gorgeously geeky Googler" is well-respected within the Googleplex. Perhaps among the executives Google PR trotted out for the ritual encomiums, but not among the rank and file. One engineering group so loathed Mayer that they threw a party when they were assigned a new boss. A ray of hope for anyone still suffering under Mayer's lash: In this piece, she announces that she may leave the company in two years. If, on the other hand, you can't get enough of Mayer, here's some obsessive biographical detail exerpted from "Googirl," as well as the article's opening shot:
- $5 million, 38th-floor penthouse at the Four Seasons
- Mayer is infatuated with the color purple ... a formfitting deep-purple dress by C.D. Greene with small black mirrors ... the bedroom's violet walls — replicated from one of her favorite cashmere sweaters — ... announce her love of eye-poppingly bright colors and Marimekko-type patterns
- A social climber who paid $60,000 to win lunch with Oscar de la Renta
- Once dated Google cofounder Larry Page
- Rumored to be worth several hundred million dollars
- As vice president of search products and user experience, Mayer manages 150 product managers, who direct the efforts of nearly 2,000 software engineers
- Her pet dog, an Aibo robot named Rover
- She also has a Craftsman in Palo Alto
- She'd recently bought an array of cookbooks to study the cupcake recipes in each, created a spreadsheet for the ingredients, and then tested the recipes before writing her own
- She made another spreadsheet for frosting.
- The ceiling installation she commissioned from the famous glass artist Dale Chihuly: 400 pieces of blown glass in the shapes of sea flora and fauna.
- A wall-size light panel with 576 individually placed Ping-Pong balls, which Mayer made over eight weekends spent home alone, inspired by the light display she'd seen at a 2005 U2 concert.
- Original works by Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, and Roy Lichtenstein.
- Mayer had 12 job offers: Carnegie Mellon, McKinsey, Oracle.
- For the first month at work, she was a closet InfoSeek user, turning her computer screen so no one would see.
- Her high school debate team ... won the state championship her senior year.
- Her all-time favorite foods include duck confit Sloppy Joes, sliders of Angus beef with brie, and macaroni and cheese with lobster.
- dozens of Mayer's favorite Sprungli Luxemburgerli (bite-size macaroons), which she brought back from Zurich, where she was on business a few days earlier. She even sent invitees a Wikipedia link to information about the treat.
- Mayer samples a piece of cake and says, "I'm a huge fan of frosting. Vanilla fudge is my favorite. It gives you brain euphoria."
- Her favorite designers are de la Renta and Carolina Herrera.
FULL COVERAGE OF THE GOOGIRL SCANDAL
Comments
What a cool mix of chick and geek. Seriously. A robot pet dog. Spreadsheets for recipes. Does her own art. A strange mix of the comfortable and exotic for food. Very intriguing woman!
i bet she's going to have extremely interesting kids
Spreadsheets used for cooking... :o)
@elvenjewel: Yeah, "intriguing". Just wait, in 30 years, you'll be reading about her and her 30 cats...
"A wall-size light panel with 576 individually placed Ping-Pong balls, which Mayer made over eight weekends spent home *alone*"
Ouch.
@ThatKid:
WTF, please tell me this wasn't the 20% "passionate project."
Yeah, but does she do OC-80
She's kind of cute I guess. Gorgeous though??? Nah.
It tells where the Valley is vs. NYC
A social climber who paid $60,000 to win lunch with Oscar de la Renta
And she doesn't have to pay anything to enjoy the company of Jakob Lodwick. She can use the dough on extra ping pong balls.
What a coincidence! I once saw a live "performance" involving 576 individually placed Ping-Pong balls and a woman on stage. This was in Tijuana.
I think she's awesome and don't mind admitting a huge platonic girl crush on her. I love that she can be so awesomely smart and powerful and techy and girly. I wish there were less haters. So she can have a scary robot laugh and some of the rank and file hate her. This makes her different from other bosses with weird personal tics how...?
Isn't Four Seasons chain owned by Bill Gates ?
hmm may be she kept pushing the enginering group to make the product more usable google is well know for having basic errors in some of the services it launches.
Webmaster tools had basic tabbing sequence errors for months and didnt work properly in IE
As of this morning (2.28.08 9:50 EST) this article is referenced in her wikipedia bio
She comes off as bat-shit insane.
@lex99: Even worse lex. After 576 shots of tequila I think I wound up marrying her.
But she is a riot at family reunions.
i used to work with her. grace kelly? more like katie couric... de la renta? try l. l. bean
Some serious jumping the shark here.
Sheesh! Googirl? Didn't they, like, Google that before writing it in two-foot letter behind her head? here's the top hit: [www.urbandictionary.com]
Or perhaps she's trying to let us know something. I think we should be told.
"Marissa is surprisingly pretty in person," says Valleywag blogger and editor Owen Thomas. "That in itself is a rarity in Silicon Valley, and you'd have to be naïve to think that doesn't color people's views of her."
@Reginaldo FTW. By the time I got to "Also see Semen receptacle and Cum Dumpster" I was cackling. But who's going to do the photoshopping?
"Once dated Google cofounder Larry Page"
Does that mean that she had an one-time Google orgy with him??
"A wall-size light panel with 576 individually placed Ping-Pong balls, which Mayer made over eight weekends spent home alone..."
Sad. Just sad. All that wealth, decent looks and still can't get a date? She lives in SOMA and can easily find something to do, but I digress...
There are plenty of chicks in Sili Valley, ugly, average (as in this case), and hot, who are smart.
Now... the trick is to be at the right place at the right time.
Sooooo vain!
Wow, another Marissa Mayer puff piece about how adorably quirky/interesting/smart she is and her mediocre attempts at style (and oh yeah, don't forget, she only need four hours of sleep!). Her PR team must be working overtime trying to improve her status in the SF Society pecking order. There are plenty of Googlers who are more accomplished, but they just happen to be a little more modest (and lack the society ambitions). Alert us when she actually ships a new product that matters.
googirl...? really? she doesn't look like any of the googirls i have (ahem) seen...
Once dated Google cofounder Larry Page
ah, now I get what Goo girl means...
@dalejo: Which will all be taken care of according to some scientific formula she's worked out, I'm sure. :)
[www.urbandictionary.com]
@elvenjewel: Intriguing because you don't actually know her.
@QADude: And what does that tell you about her personality?
1. could she be more nouveau?
2. did she actually know that she was being interviewed for a piece that would be like, published?
I hope she has good upper body strength bc with this in print her climb is going to get ridiculously difficult.
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