Marissa Mayer on Life and Leadership Lessons (Transcript)

Marissa Mayer

Here is the full transcript of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s fireside talk on Life and Leadership Lessons at Stanford GSB on Thursday, January 26, 2017.

INTERVIEWER: Marissa, it’s such a pleasure to have you here today.

MARISSA MAYER: Thank you for having me.

INTERVIEWER: Welcome back to Stanford.

MARISSA MAYER: I’m very excited to be here.

INTERVIEWER: I’d love to start out with your time at Stanford here. So, you came in pre-med with ambitions to become a physician, and you transitioned over to symbolic systems. What was that pivot like?

MARISSA MAYER: Well so, I was very precise in what I thought I wanted to do. I had looked at a lot of schools before picking Stanford and in those travels, I had met this really fascinating woman, very famous pediatric heart surgeon who works at Duke. And her name is Marjorie Tripp. And I talked to her, and she said, I’m a doctor, I do extraordinary cases, but I also teach at the med school and I thought, that sounded so great. So, I realized that I wasn’t interested in hearts, but I was like, I’ll be a pediatric neurosurgeon, I love kids, and I’m very interested in the brain, how it develops, so I came here very intent on that.

And through my freshman year, I took the chemistry course started getting going on, the biology core, went home for the summer after my freshman year and kind of compared notes with all of my different friends, I’m from Wisconsin, who’d gone to different schools. And I realized that we were learning very much the same things all over. And I thought, I’d had the opportunity to go to University of Wisconsin Madison, it’s a great school. And, because of various scholarships and things, that would have been a nearly free option. Stanford, on the other hand, is very much not free.