Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's impressive career began at Google where she spent a decade there making a fortune. But it wasn't always like this, in fact, it almost wasn't the case at all. Nicholas Carlson from Business Insider's got an unauthorized biography of her detailed here.

He describes how a lucky keystroke helped Marissa Mayer land a job at Google. When she graduated from Stanford, she received more than 12 job offers. When an email from a recruiter appeared in her inbox, she tried to delete it.

But she missed the delete key and ended up opening the pitch instead. It was an opportunity at Google, a startup she had heard from a Stanford professor. Nicholas Carlsondescribes the lucky incident:
Instead of hitting delete, Mayer hit the space bar and opened the email.

That email’s subject line: “Work at Google?”

Mayer read the email and remembered a conversation she had with Eric Roberts who was still a mentor years after she took his computer science class for non-majors. The prior fall, Roberts listened to Mayer talk about the recommendation engine she’d built, and then told her she should meet with a pair of Ph.D. students who were working on similar stuff. Their names: Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Mayer realized that Google was their startup. Trusting Roberts' recommendation, she replied to an email she had meant to delete, writing that she’d like an interview.
Lending creed to the saying a "stroke of luck" sounds so true here.