Renegade Chick of the Week: Google VP, Marissa Mayer, to be Yahoo CEO

Marissa Mayer is joining an elite club of powerful women in Silicon Valley as she has been tapped to become the next C.E.O of Yahoo. She is now a part of a very select group of women who are leaders in the tech world, including: Virginia Rometty, the head of IBM; Meg Whitman, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer.

Mayer, 37, began her career at Google as their first female engineer and was in charge of the look and feel of some of Google’s most popular products, including Google Maps, Google Images, Google News and the search homepage. As she begins the transition to Yahoo, Google is losing one of the few public faces of the company.

The New York Times reports, “Ms. Mayer resigned from Google on Monday afternoon by telephone. She starts at Yahoo on Tuesday. Ms. Mayer will also join Yahoo’s board.” The NYT also states, “In an interview, Ms. Mayer said she ‘had an amazing time at Google,’ where she has worked for the last 13 years, but that ultimately ‘it was a reasonably easy decision’ to take the top job at Yahoo. She said Yahoo was ‘one of the best brands on the Internet.’”

In our eyes, Mayer is a true renegade. Instead of “playing it safe” and staying at Google where she was comfortable for 13 years, she has decided to take a big risk and accept a job that many would turn down due to the unstable future of Yahoo. For years now, Yahoo has been on the decline, but Mayer has the opportunity to change this even thought the company does not have a good record with CEOs: “Yahoo’s corner office has been a revolving door over the last decade as the company has unsuccessfully sought to return to its original glory days in the late 1990s. Since 1995, the company has had at least seven different permanent and interim chiefs” writes The New York Times. Mayer has a lot to prove.

Yahoo’s fate is questionable, but no matter what happens, we know Mayer has a bright future.