Accidental Email Led Mayer to Become Google’s First Female Engineer

The former CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, began her career at Google when it was a startup, and is best recognized for her time as CEO of Yahoo, but before that, she took a chance and joined a then-unknown firm named Google. Beginning her Google career with a missing keystroke in 1999, she unintentionally opened a recruiter email she intended to delete while assessing job offers as a Stanford computer science graduate.

That lucky mistake propelled Mayer to become Google’s first female engineer and 20th total employee, laying the groundwork for her important career in technology leadership. Despite having 14 other job offers from established corporations during the dot-com boom, Mayer chose the then-unknown startup after her Stanford professor Eric Roberts suggested she meet with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Although she would later become Google’s 20th employee and first female engineer, Mayer, a graduating computer science major at Stanford during the height of the tech boom in 1999, received 14 job offers from large businesses. Unsure which to choose, Mayer considered all of the wonderful decisions she had made up to that point, according to an interview at Fortune’s MPW conference in 2011, which included choosing Stanford, changing her degree from medicine, and working in Switzerland for a summer.

When she looked into what made those decisions outstanding, she discovered a similar thread: Mayer thrived in the uncertainty.

“I always did something I felt a little unready to do,” she told Fortune.

In the end, it was a coincidence that prompted her to consider Google as a career path. According to Business Insider, Mayer went to delete one of the recruiter emails in her inbox but instead opened it due to a mistaken typing. When she saw the Google recruiter email, she remembered that her mentor, Stanford professor Eric Roberts, had suggested she meet the founders, Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Rather than deleting the email, Mayer requested an interview.

Despite the fact that she happened to be applying to Google, Mayer was willing to take a chance on the nascent firm trying to change search, even though it had fewer than two dozen employees at the time.

“When you do something you’re not ready to do, that’s when you push yourself and when you grow,” she told me.

Mayer’s growth continues with his role as a corporate director. Nextdoor Holdings, which operates the same-named neighbourhood-based software, appointed Mayer to its board of directors this summer. She is also on the boards of Walmart and AT&T.

According to Mayer, surrounding herself with the proper people is another essential criterion that jumped out while she was considering a career at Google. One of Mayer’s closest friends worked at Google and said she was already “really impressed” with Page and Brin.

“I always surrounded myself with the smartest people I could find,” she stated. “Because I think that when you’re surrounded by smart people, they challenge you, and they make you think about things, you know, harder and and just rise to another level.”

All of these criteria made Mayer’s decision simple. Mayer worked at Google for over a decade before being handed the top post at Yahoo. Despite being heavily attacked throughout her tenure, Mayer tripled the company’s stock price and led it through a sale to Verizon in 2017. Mayer now manages Sunshine, an artificial intelligence business that raised $20 million in 2020 “to simplify and learn from people’s digital address books,” according to Fortune.