How Yahoo ex-CEO 'accidentally' became Google's first female engineer

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer 's trajectory at Google began with a misplaced keystroke, accidentally opening a recruiter email she meant to delete while reviewing job offers as a Stanford computer science graduate in 1999.

That fortuitous mistake led Mayer to become Google's first female engineer and 20th employee overall, setting the stage for her influential career in tech leadership. Despite having 14 other job offers from established companies during the dot-com boom, Mayer chose the then-unknown startup after recalling her Stanford professor Eric Roberts' suggestion to meet founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin .

The decision aligned with Mayer's pattern of embracing uncertainty in her career choices. "I always did something I felt a little unready to do," she revealed at Fortune's MPW conference in 2011. This philosophy, combined with her practice of surrounding herself with brilliant minds, influenced her choice to join the fledgling search engine company.

Mayer's 13-year tenure at Google preceded her appointment as Yahoo's CEO, where she led the company through significant changes, including tripling its stock price and orchestrating its $4.48 billion sale to Verizon in 2017.

Currently, Mayer serves on the boards of prominent companies including Walmart , AT&T, and Nextdoor Holdings. She's also ventured into entrepreneurship with Sunshine, an AI startup she founded that secured $20 million in funding in 2020. The company focuses on developing technology to enhance and learn from digital address books.