The former Google exec is number three on Fortune magazine’s just-released “40 Under 40” hit list. For the accompanying sidebar profile, reporter Patricia Sellers talked to dozens of friends, colleagues and acquaintances about Yahoo’s fourth chief executive in five years (and youngest leader of any Fortune 500 company):

“When Marissa became captain of the pompom squad, she wasn’t in with that clique of girls, but she won them over in three ways,” recalls Abigail Garvey Wilson, Mayer’s best friend from childhood. “First, sheer talent. Marissa could choreograph a great routine. Second, hard work. She scheduled practices lasting hours to make sure everyone was synchronized. And third, fairness. With Marissa in charge, the best dancers made the team.”

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Mayer’s husband is Zachary Bogue, a lawyer who traded practicing law to invest in “big-data startups,” she says…

Mayer first disclosed to the Yahoo board that she is pregnant in late June, in a meeting with Michael Wolf, a member of the board’s four-person CEO search committee. A meeting with the search committee followed, and then Mayer met with the full board last Wednesday. None of the Yahoo directors, she says, revealed any concern about hiring a pregnant chief executive. “They showed their evolved thinking,” says Mayer, who got the phone call last Thursday that she was the board’s choice to be CEO.

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