So What’s the Story with Google’s New CEO?

You’ll have to ask Wikipedia buddy, but I can tell you about Google’s true shot caller, Marissa Mayer. Within a socially acceptable distance from my age, Marissa began opening a series of cans of whoop-ass as if she were a whoop-ass can factory since she was a kid, receiving her Stamford University acceptance letter without any surprise as she proceeded to scoop up a few degrees focusing on artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence for two degrees.

She teaches computer programming at Stanford where scoring a slot in one of her classes is like winning the lottery (actually I bet it is a lottery). Why? This cat hopped aboard Google in ‘99, Google’s twentieth employee and the first female engineer and today she has at least temporarily retired her title of VP of Search and User Experience to get in on some newer turf as VP of Location and Local Services. More on that later. First female engineer at Google, youngest in Fortune’s 50th most powerful women list to date.

She’s extraordinary and extraordinarily prolific. It would take a lethal dose of Adderall for any of us to match her productivity, which I suppose is a paradox. This young lady was among the top brains behind over a hundred Google products, services and their various features with respect chiefly to the user interface, the design and the general user experience, with a high batting average behind those things becoming hits including Google News, Gmail, Image Search. Among her responsibilities, and this is the thing I think I’d be really good at, determining whether or not a product, whether she had been involved with it or not, not only has legs but is ready to make its debut or is ready to be scrapped. Maybe she was on vacation during the Google Wave episode. I’d certainly want a vacation if everyone constantly wrote about how sexy and smart I was… exhausting!

She acts as one of Google’s “faces” (if you want my opinion she should be the only one) with Google parading her everywhere, front and center at major public events, television interviews and the like, and she is the subject of fascination of people like me obviously and the rest of the media. No shortage of material for me to find on her to compose an article. Actually I saw one of these interviews one late night when MSNBC was running several year old company profiles and interviews. She’s a magnet stuffed with military grade je ne sais quoi and je sais exactement quoi. I bet she even speaks French among two other languages. Ten bucks on that anyone, without trying to look it up?

I was quite taken by the combination of her youth and looks with, when in a group setting, she was leading and directing a group of people as if it were second nature. A little harsh at times but appropriately and effectively so. She struck me as a figuratively priceless asset to any outfit that wants to get things done, Google hopefully being the perfect candidate for her as it would make me less obsessed were her eyes to start wandering.

With exception to the contexts of dating and marrying I love women who are type A naturally strong locomotives of business might. Naturally like that; not to prove some sort of point or climb their mountain, but to get things done, the type that you don’t want to get in the way of, the type you don’t resent as she flies right by you up the company totem poll (though wherever she started she’d be at the top anyway, but you know what I mean). The type of woman who is like that compulsively, not just naturally. And with the type of woman like that who incidentally is a head turner, the type you don’t want to risk her catching you eyeing her from behind. Fear, respect, productivity, fawning, admiration, product or general company success – those are the things that she attracts or brews.

Damnit I can’t find that old video. Might have been with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, or maybe I’m just thinking of her because she’s also got the look and vibe. Guess I’ll use one that you may find intriguing:

Got an hour and a half to kill?

At the end of 2009 Marissa invested in Square, a company that thought there was money to be made in what we now know as NFC, near field communication, what Schmidt (and soon Jobs, God willing) was talking about when playing with his Nexus S, saying that it will replace credit cards. According to CrunchBase she was one of 18 putting together $10mil in Series A funding. Now Square is quite entrenched in NFC, currently valued in the neighborhood of $200m. I could sure use an RSS feed of her investment maneuvers.

Marissa Mayer is the kind of person that even if you subtract all of her celebrity and, though I don’t know why you’d want to do this even in a hypothetical situation, her looks too, put her in any situation and she will rise fast, taking the situation, if it happens to be a company employing a bunch of people, or a group of people who crash landed on an island that turned out to be limbo, with her. A genius behind a keyboard, in a boardroom, in a kitchen, on stage, a genius of color keeping Google and her home looking right, a genius in front of a camera. Everything this woman touches, except Orkut (what the hell was that anyway), turns to gold. Most of the time. Here is one woman who is both really easy on the eyes and has quite an eye in the figurative sense. They single out one eye in the figurative sense.

Another thing, according to the Times, this woman really knows how to party unapologetically, which may not be an easy thing to do in the city of nerds. Well Marissa, please party hard, use the robot cars to get home and enjoy your cupcakes because we can’t have you burning out on us. Hey, what’s that Jimi Hendrix song that keeps playing in my head when I picture this gal?

Doug Simmons