The Rise of Marissa Mayer, Founder of Sunshine Contacts
Marisa Mayer is one of the incredible women in the tech world who rose from an early employee to a big time tech founder. Before developing Sunshine Contacts, Mayer was an early employee at Google and then became Yahoo’s President & CEO.
The Sunshine Contacts app helps people share and update their contact information with others. The app currently allows millions of users to have an organized contact list. But what’s the story behind the founder of Sunshine Contacts? Let’s delve into that.
“I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough.”
- Marissa Mayer
A Pediatric Neurosurgeon Who Wasn’t To Be
Even though Marissa Mayer grew up as an active child who had a lot of after-school activities to attend, she still made time to excel at schoolwork. She excelled in physics, chemistry, biology, and calculus; she even took pre-med classes at Stanford University.
After she switched courses to Symbolic Systems she graduated with honors, attracting over 14 job offers.
Mayer accepted the job offer from Google in 1999, where she started writing code and supervising small teams of engineers responsible for designing Google search offerings. During her over ten years tenure at Google, Mayer rose from associate product manager to vice president of Google Search products and user experience.
Mayer’s Game Changer Career
In 2012 Marissa Mayer got a new job at Yahoo as the President and CEO, where she helped the organization achieve notable milestones. For example, she helped the company acquire Tumblr in 2013 and double the stock price of Yahoo within 14 months.
However, her leadership at Yahoo also came with its share of problems, as some employees were unhappy with her leadership model, especially after she introduced the performance review system.
Mayer’s pressure and challenges at Yahoo caused her to resign in June 2017. But this was the dawn of a new era, as Lumi Labs was born after a partnership with Enrique Munoz Torres. The Palo Alto-based company rebranded to Sunshine in 2020 on November 18th. After that, Mayer announced her first product, Sunshine Contacts, which helps improve iPhone and Google contacts using intelligent algorithms and contact data.
Departure from Yahoo. Birth of Sunshine Contacts
Marissa Mayer believes that just as technology can help drive a car, so should it organize contacts on your phones or devices. Mayer founded Sunshine Contacts in 2018 with the help of cofounder Enrique Munoz Torres.
The innovation came after Mayer resigned from a senior position at Yahoo. This was after she experienced problems managing lengthy contact lists on her iPhone. Through Lumi Lab, Mayer aimed to create a better app that uses AI to make tasks like organizing, scheduling, or sharing contacts much easier.
What Pushed Mayer into Developing the App
The idea of developing the app came to Mayer’s mind after she experienced challenges managing her contact list. Mayer had over 14,000 contacts on her iPhone and several people she could call in a day, leaving her frustrated because she had not met some of her expectations. She, therefore, brought her team members to task and developed Sunshine Contacts.
Sunshine Contacts, the company’s first product, made Mayer spend $20 million as capital. The downloadable app allows users to access their Apple and Gmail contacts without many challenges.
It organizes users’ contact lists and messages to create a database of people they know. The secure tool also deletes double entries, fills in gaps, and syncs information, helping users stay organized. Sunshine Contacts also enables users to easily share contacts with people nearby.
What’s Unique About Sunshine Contacts
According to Mayer, Sunshine Contacts helps enrich individuals’ contact information as its possible to merge phone numbers from Apple contacts and those from Gmail. She further clarifies that the app enables individual users to share their contact information after updating their card, just like Apple’s native contact app works.
Sunshine Contacts makes remembering birthdays, tasks, and meetings easier, which builds relationships and creates great memories.
References:
Marissa Mayer’s startup launches its first official product, Sunshine Contacts | TechCrunch
Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Makes Comeback With Sunshine Contacts App | Technology News
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