Surround yourself with the smartest people possible.

????Mayer graduated from Stanford in 1999, amidst the height of the first tech bubble, when she had a good problem on her hands: 14 job offers. What to do?

????She says she looked for the common thread of all the best decisions she had made: going to Stanford, changing her major from pediatric neuroscience to symbolic systems, spending a summer working in artificial intelligence and another in banking in Zurich.

????"I always surrounded myself with the smartest people I could find," she say. She settled on Google, she adds, because she knew the team there would help her coding skills grow a lot, regardless of the startup's success.