Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's new startup is deliberately targeting 'mundane' tasks, and the first one is a holiday app that organizes addresses

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Marissa Mayer

• Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's startup Lumi Labs launched in March 2018, and has mostly stayed quiet since.
• Lumi's website says the company is focused on building consumer applications that use AI to solve everyday tasks.
• The world is now getting a look at the first such app, called Holiday Helper, which helps people organize their holiday contact information for sending cards and gifts.
• If it sounds mundane, that's because it is supposed to be.
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Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's startup Lumi Labs launched in March 2018, and has been fairly quiet ever since.

Its website says the company is focused on building consumer applications that use AI to solve everyday tasks.

The world is now getting a look at the first such app from the company, called Holiday Helper. It's an app that lets you upload a list of email addresses, reaches out to each person, and asks them to fill out a form with their latest contact and mailing info. When most of them have responded, it compiles the list and gives you printable mailing labels so you can send out cards and gifts.

The app is currently for desktop use only - if you try to access it on your phone you'll get an error message telling you that mobile isn't supported.

If that sounds like the kind of weekend project a programmer would do and share on a service like GitHub, Mayer says that this is exactly the point.

While a lot of tech companies talk about using AI to make people's lives more productive, Mayer's startup is bent on finding and automating the type of tasks that are "so mundane and so time-consuming that a lot of people [choose not to] do them," she told Fast Company.

Another example is an app that looks through your camera roll to identity the blurry photos and also identify the good ones you might want to share, based on your past history of sharing, Fast company reports.

Another interesting tidbit about Lumi Labs is that it is located on hallowed ground in Silicon Valley, at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. That's the same space where Google was located when it was a tiny startup, after it moved out of Susan Wojcicki's garage. That same office was also the home to PayPal when it was a startup, too.

It's also where Mayer landed a job with Google when she was fresh from college. Wojcicki is now CEO of YouTube, while Mayer went on to become a major force and top executive as Google grew. Eventually, Mayer left Google to run Yahoo as CEO, ultimately selling it to Verizon for $4.83 billion in 2016.

Mayer is an active angel investor with over 24 investments under her belt, according to Crunchbase. But she's still more interested in being a CEO than in being an investor, she said in 2017. Now, we're finally get a first peek at Lumi, the startup she's growing from scratch.

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