Profile: Google's Marissa Mayer

Those within the industry have known of Marissa Mayer's impact on Google's success for awhile now. She's often a featured speaker at industry events and shows up frequently in articles about the engine's latest projects. However, an article in the October edition of Business Week takes things a step further and shares some insight into how Mayer got to where she is and what she's doing to help Google stay ahead of competitors. There's some valuable insight to be gained from the Mayer interview, including how a small business can work to maintain its' culture as it blossoms into a behemoth.

A fellow Stanford grad, Mayer had heard of Google, but written them off as just another dot com start up, until a headhunter convinced her to give the company a try. Mayer was one of the first 20 employees in the door. Today, she serves as director of consumer Web products, overseeing the idea generation process of Google's staff of 4,000.

Mayer has her hands on virtually everything the average Google user sees -- from the look of its Web pages to new software for searching your hard drive. And she helps decide which new initiatives get the attention of the company's founders and which don't.

Google's rapid expansion from a few dozen employees to a firm of more than 4,000 moves it out of the realm of small businesses and into mega-corporation. But the thing to keep in mind is that almost all mega-corporations start out as small businesses. Even if you never intend to grow larger than a handful of employees, there's something to be learned about success from the ones who make it big.

A few key points to take away from the article:

Let all employees come up with ideas. - Google has long encouraged their employees to brainstorm new ways of doing things. In fact, all engineers are given a full day each week to dedicate to their own pet projects.

Have an open door. - Mayer has office hours three times a week so that employees can come in and brainstorm new ideas with her. Successful Google offerings like Google Desktop, Orkut and Google News all started as employee pet projects.

Play together. - While setting up a movie night for 4,000 isn't quite as easy as for 100, Google still occasionally takes a trek to see a flick together. (Imagine all of Google showing up for a screening of Star Wars Episode III.)