How Marissa Mayer Once Convinced This Exec To Work At Google

While finishing up her studies at Stanford, Jess Lee, now the CEO of fashion website Polyvore, received an engineering offer at Intuit that she was planning on taking.

That is, before she got a call from a recruiter at Google to interview for the associate product manager program.

Lee tells Adam Bryant at The New York Times that she didn't know what a product manager did and went to the interview at Google with no plans to work for them. Lee ended up meeting with the now Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and told the former Googler: "I don't know if I want to work here. I have this other offer. I think I'm going to be an engineer."

At the time, Google was not as well-established as Intuit.

Here's what Mayer told her: "The best advice I can give you is that when I had to make a choice between two paths, I always chose the more challenging one, and that has always been the correct decision. So you should think about that."

That's how Lee ended up at Google for four years, which led her to Polyvore in 2008. She became chief executive of Polyvore in 2012.

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