The former CEO of Yahoo got her start at Google when it was a startup after she accidentally opened a recruiter email she meant to delete and ultimately got the job.

Marissa Mayer is most well-known for her stint as CEO of Yahoo, but before she took the helm of the tech giant, she took a serendipitous dive into the unknown by joining a then little-known startup called Google.


Although she would later become Google’s 20th employee and first female engineer, as a graduating computer science major at Stanford during the height of the tech bubble in 1999, Mayer found herself with 14 job offers to major companies. Unsure of which to choose, Mayer took stock of all the good decisions she had made up until that time, according to an interview at Fortune’s MPW conference in 2011, which included picking Stanford, pivoting away from a major in medicine, and working in Switzerland for a summer

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