Machine Dreams

"Do something you're not ready to do", says Mayer. In the worst case you'll learn your limitations".

Marissa Mayer is the world's most poised and powerful information guru. Marissa Mayer, the 34-year-old megamillionaire, Oscar de la Renta–obsessed, computer-programming Google executive who lives in a penthouse atop the Four Seasons, San Francisco. Virtually, Mayer is an agglomeration of podcasts, red-carpet images, and text snippets about the physics of data, the future of news, and atomic units of consumption.

In actuality, Mayer is just as resistant to the kinds of unitary categories that the regular three-dimensional world insists on. It’s not only that she demolishes old-fashioned oppositions of beauty and brains, or women and science, or chic and geek. It’s that she’s elusive in person (meeting her is all about fragments of time, as her busyness is quasi-presidential); that she works for a company that makes billions in the transparency business but is opaque with regard to its internal doings; and, most definitively, that she is so extreme and multipolar in her accomplishments that one fumbles to bundle it all up into the linear narrative so beloved by humans since the Bible.

In 1999, a Stanford computer-science M.A. turns down a teaching job at Carnegie Mellon, among other opportunities, in order to join a fledgling Silicon Valley start-up with a silly name. At the job interview she’s asked stuff like “How would you write a spell-check program when you have a vocabulary so big it won’t fit in a computer?” Mayer becomes Google employee number 20. She and Google flourish. Says computer-science professor Eric Roberts, her Stanford mentor, “She hitched her wagon to the correct star. That’s not a negative critique of her; that’s what the Valley is like.” He adds, “Success in this field is dependent on temperament,” i.e., “the drive not to be beaten by machines.” A product manager, she creates the famous home page: simple and unchanging, delightful to purists and pragmatists alike. Her ideas are omnipresent (everywhere) through out the actual designs, their simplicity and intuitive ease of use (you can identify her influence in the design, etc). As the company grows, so too Mayer’s responsibilities: She oversees the development, code-writing, and launch of Gmail, Google Maps, Google, Google Chrome, Google Health, and Google News. There is a vast, impenetrable techie world of Google profit-making activity that is insider stuff; but Google for the masses, is Mayer’s fiefdom (under her complete control or authority).

In short, she is obsessed with puzzling out the consumer’s relationship to clicks. Mayer’s job is to be in sync with change.