The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once beloved CEO of Yahoo (YHOO)

AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau

Hopes were high when Marissa Mayer was hired as Yahoo CEO in 2012. People thought she would turn around the perennially dysfunctional internet giant.

But three years in and Mayer's time at Yahoo has been marred by slowing growth and internal dissent, leading to plummeting employee morale.

Now, some Yahoo investors are demanding a change in management, including a replacement for Mayer.

We went through a bunch of recent news stories and Nicholas Carlson's book — "Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!" — to put together the story of Mayer's epic rise to become one of the biggest Silicon Valley power players and her sudden fall.

Mayer was born in 1975 in a small Wisconsin town called Wausau. Her father was an engineer and her mother was an art teacher.

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She developed an early talent for math and science, and teachers loved her. Although she was a good presenter, her friends didn't take her as particularly extroverted. In fact, Mayer once described the child version of herself as "painfully shy."

Wausau West High School Yearbook 

Mayer applied to 10 schools and got accepted to all of them, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. She ended up going to Stanford, where she first took premed courses, in hopes of becoming a doctor.

Marissa Mayer/Google+