Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer believes the tech business is about to be set ablaze by A.I., like a forest torched by a wildfire. But as with the cycles of nature that affect the landscape, Mayer believes the tech industry will ultimately come out stronger.
“The strong trees and the strong vegetation survive, and all the brush gets cleared out. And it actually allows for healthy regrowth afterwards,” Mayer said at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, which occurred this week in Deer Valley, Utah.
“No one likes to see a company that’s been funded, has had some success, not do well,” she said. “But it ultimately leads to a healthier outcome for the industry.”
Mayer, who began her career as Google’s 20th employee in 1999 and is now the CEO of consumer A.I. startup Sunshine, said she believes A.I. technology has reached a point where its impact on the industry will be huge.
“I’ve been waiting for an inflection point for 29 years, and I think that’s what is happening,” Mayer said. “The question is: what do we do with the energy that comes out of this inflection point?” Mayer asked in an on-stage conversation with ACME Capital general partner Aike Ho, Gitlab CMO and CSO Ashley Kramer, Lacework CEO Jay Parikh and moderator Molly Wood of Molly Wood Media.
Though Mayer has played in politics as a large democratic donor, she believes that A.I. regulation should happen within the tech industry rather than by government entities. “Everything is moving so fast that everyone is struggling to keep up,” she says. “When you’re doing regulation, you can’t regulate this moment; you need to regulate where you’re going to be in three to five years, and that’s actually very hard to predict.”
Mayer, who had a rocky tenure as Yahoo’s chief executive from 2012 to 2017, oversaw the company’s Tumblr acquisition and vacated her position after the pioneering internet company was acquired by Verizon for $4.8 billion in 2017. Now Mayer oversees Sunshine, which she founded with the mission of tapping A.I. to streamline personal administration tasks like social calendaring. The company last raised $20 million from investors like Norwest and Next Play Capital at a $60 million valuation in 2020.
