Marissa Mayer

Management is defense. You basically say, 'This is the direction; this is where we're heading,' and then it's my job to get everything else out of the way. All the other things that can become a distraction keep us from executing well. Get those out of the way, because the team ultimately needs to run in that direction and execute well.

Product management really is the fusion between technology, what engineers do - and the business side.

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.

I pace myself by taking a week-long vacation every four months.

The interesting thing is when you look at what people want to do on their phone, it's mail, weather, check stock quotes and news. That's Yahoo's business. This is a huge opportunity for us because we have the content and all the information people want on their phones.

When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'

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.

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

Well, I have one of the best jobs in the world.

I like to do matrices. One option per line, different facets for each column. Salary, location, happiness index, failure index, and all that.

Will the social networking phenomenon lessen? I don't think so.