Marissa Mayer

“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.”

“I loved Stanford and symbolic systems. For me, I came to Stanford assuming I would be a doctor and got really deep into chemistry and biology, but I noticed everyone who was on the same track as me was taking the exact same classes. I wanted to do something more unique.”

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

“I could imagine, some number of years from now, starting my own company. But not yet. Not for a while.”

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

“The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be.”

“I think like my dad, but I have a huge kinship with my mom.”

“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.'”

“The turning point for me was realizing that I would learn more at Google, trying to build a company, regardless of whether we failed or succeeded, than I would at any of the other companies I had offers from.”

“Good students are good at all things.”

“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.”

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

“I was always good at math and science, and I never realized that that was unusual or somehow undesirable.”

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

“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.”

“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.'”

“It was a very well-rounded childhood with lots of different opportunities. My mom will say she set out to overstimulate me - surround me with way too many things and let me pick. As a result, I've always been a multitasker; I've always liked a lot of variety.”

“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.”

“Blackberry is a great product and really useful. But I think that Yahoo!'s future is going to be rooted in mobile apps. And we know that we need to have apps on some of the core platforms, and so iOS and Android, probably the two most important platforms for us.”

“I didn't want to lose my sense of myself in my profession.”