Marissa Mayer is immediately the new CEO of Yahoo, the company has announced. Mayer previously worked at Google and was one of the company’s first employees. She succeeds interim CEO Ross Levinsohn at Yahoo.
Mayer’s appointment should end the uncertainty surrounding the top position at Yahoo. Since Terry Semel left the company in 2007, CEOs have never lasted more than two years, and Mayer becomes the third person to lead Yahoo this year. In January, former PayPal CEO Scott Thompson took office as CEO, but he was soon forced to leave due to an inaccuracy on his resume. Since then, Ross Levinsohn has been interim CEO.
Mayer studied computer science and started working for Google when the company was first founded: she was employee number twenty and the first female engineer at the search giant. Over the years, she rose to the position of vice president of the search department, where she was responsible for parts of the search engine, Gmail and Google News, among other things. In 2010, she became vice president of the Local, Maps and Location Services division.
Mayer will also join Yahoo’s board of directors as the new CEO. It is not yet clear what will happen to Ross Levinsohn. Before taking the position of interim CEO, he was head of the company’s media department.