Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed: Marissa Mayer

by Scott Edward Walker on July 18th, 2012

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a favorite video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we present Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo! and a very smart engineer.

In this interesting presentation and Q&A from 2006 (courtesy of Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner), Marissa shares some solid nuggets for entrepreneurs based on her early experience at Google, including the following:

• recognize that ideas come from everywhere;
• maintain an open company culture and share significant internal information;
• work in an environment with a lot of smart people;
• give your product people the opportunity to be creative and pursue their interests;
• launch quickly and iterate based on user feedback;
• make decisions based on data and A/B testing;
• set limits and constraints, which will actually facilitate innovation;
• remember that money follows users; and
• don’t kill projects, morph them.

I hope you enjoy it.  Many thanks, Scott

 

Tags: engineer, entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Corner, Google, Marissa Mayer, Stanford, Yahoo!