by Steve Levy
Marissa Mayer would retain a strong memory of one moment from those late-night sessions. One of the engineers, Georges Harik, was sitting on one of the massive physio balls that Sergey would sometimes use as the end point of a running start and a big dramatic leap. (It freaked out visitors, and even some employees feared emergency room consequences.) Suddenly Harik bounded off it.
“I just want everyone to just savor this moment,” Georges said. “Look at how much fun this is. Look at these ideas. No matter what happens from right now on, it’ll never be as good as it is right now.”
Many years later, Marissa Mayer, when she had become an incredibly wealthy and much-admired figure in technology, a subject of numerous magazine covers and a decision maker who almost every day made complex calls affecting hundreds of millions of people, would look back at that moment, when all of Google could just about fit in an SUV. “Georges is brilliant, and he’s very rarely wrong,” Marissa would say. “But when he said that, he couldn’t have been more wrong.”
It would get much better.
From the outside, Google behaved like hundreds of start-ups before it, some that succeeded and many more that fell off the earth. Its employees worked hard, went on ski trips, and had parties where everybody wore tropical clothes, drank garish mixed cocktails, and wound up sitting in the kitchen listening to John McCarthy, the crusty Stanford AI pioneer who miraculously showed up. But those who spent time talking to Larry and Sergey knew that there was something special about them and their company. The two founders had already sketched a road map that struck observers as ludicrously grandiose. But their determination and confidence when they explained their vision imbued an almost hypnotic plausibility into their wild expectations. And there was that search engine they built, so good it was scary.
Page was more of the driver of the vision. “Larry always wanted it to be a bigger thing—as soon as the opportunity presented, it was full speed ahead,” says Craig Silverstein. “Sergey was consistent with that, but I don’t think he has that drive to the same extent that Larry does. I don’t feel as confident saying what would’ve happened had Sergey made all the shots.”
Less than a year after Google moved to University Avenue, the company had already outgrown the space. This time Page and Brin figured they would move into a space they could barely fill, assuming that it wouldn’t take terribly long to grow into it. They found a 42,000-square-foot space in Mountain View, just south of Palo Alto. It was one large building in a group, off a frontage road parallel to Highway 101: 2400 Bayshore Parkway. Through a contact they called on a real estate expert named George Salah, who handled facilities for Oracle. Only as a favor to his friend did Salah agree to eyeball the vacant building and give them some advice. He was surprised to learn that Google actually was looking for a full-time facilities manager, an unusual hire for a thirty-five-person company, as Google then was.
It was a summer day in 1999 when Salah dropped by after completing his day at Oracle. One cofounder, Page, was on Rollerblades. The other, Brin, was bouncing on a humongous red gym ball. Salah reported that the building needed some work but was generally fine. When the talk turned to his coming to work there, he challenged them. “What do you need me for?” he asked. “How do you see this company in five years?”
Their answer rocked him back on his heels. In five years, they said, Google would be half the size of Yahoo and have multiple international offices, data centers around the world, and a large cluster of buildings in Mountain View. “They’re mathematicians, so they’d already done the calculations,” says Salah. He took the job, and five years later, he compared their outrageous estimates to what actually happened. “They were right on,” he says. “They knew exactly what was coming.”
On August 13, 1999, everything was packed, from the monitors to the physio balls. Susan Wojcicki was monitoring the moving men from Graebal Van Lines as they trekked up and down the steps and lugged the boxes into the trucks. Followed by a video camera wielded by Harry the Spider-Man, she took one last spin around the Palo Alto offices, checking out the cubicles, the offices, the closet loaded with routers and telecom connections (already moved to Bayshore), and one office where the businesspeople had mistaken a white cork panel for a whiteboard and written sales figures on it. (Someone had draped a T-shirt over it to hide the numbers.) Her farewell tour was interrupted by one of the moving men, who had apparently been involved when Google had made its previous jump from her house to Palo Alto. He asked if she recalled how long it had been since that transfer.
“Six months,” she said, a little wistfulness and even some anxiety in her voice. “Does it seem like shorter or longer?”
The moving man shook his head. “You don’t like to stay in a place too long? Or is your company growing?”
“Our company is growing, that’s why,” she said.
“Now you can afford to get a place with an elevator,” said the moving guy. “So you know you’re doing good.”
The Bayshore Googleplex, also known as Building Zero, or the Nullplex, was the staging ground for Google to build out its culture into a sustainable corporate structure. No matter what happened, engineers would have the run of the place: their Montessori-inspired freedom would be Google’s distinguishing trait. One morning Salah came in and was startled to find that one of the engineers, Craig Nevill-Manning, had undertaken a midnight renovation. He had decided that he didn’t like his wall. His wall. He had gotten some of his colleagues to help and removed huge slabs of drywall. Nevill-Manning greeted Salah with a big smile. “I love this!” he said. “This is so much better than it was before!” Despite the fact that he was now facing a corridor where people were constantly passing by, sometimes on Segways or Rollerblades, Nevill-Manning claimed that he felt liberated. “So we went back and took the wall apart properly, and everything was fine,” says Salah. “And of course later he changed his mind and put the wall back. But he made it a more Googley environment.” As did Craig Silverstein, who would come to the office with loaves of homemade bread and walk through the corridors calling, “Bread! Bread!” and people would run out and grab slices.
Even though Google’s finances had improved after the $25 million infusion from the VCs, Salah was directed to buy cheaply. Brin and Page gloried in frugality and worried constantly about the opportunity costs of spending in areas that didn’t directly benefit search. Though they spared no expense for engineers, in other matters they were cheap. Salah, an experienced negotiator, would buy some furnishings from a busted dot-com and think he’d done pretty well. But Page and Brin would say to him, “Why don’t you see if you could get it for half that?” Salah would go somewhere else to get a price that pleased his bosses.
The sawhorse desks became a symbol of Google’s parsimony. So did the convention of identifying the inhabitants of a cubicle or office not by embossing the name on a piece of plastic but by pasting a printout of the name on a CD jewel box. Google would often buy furniture from fire sales held at the sites of failed dot-coms. “The mishmash allowed us to create a variety of work settings,” says Salah. To his relief, when Eric Schmidt arrived in 2001, the new CEO gave a thumbs-up to the mongrel style. “Don’t change a thing,” he told Salah. “Make sure it looks like a dorm room.”
As Salah learned more about the company and began furnishing the buildings that Google would later populate, he roughed out a set of design guidelines that expressed what he saw as Larry and Sergey’s values. The list centered on several “key performance principles.” The very first one: “Create a ‘Googley’ atmosphere.”
Being truly Google goes beyond painting the walls with bright colors and liberally distributing lava lamps. A Googley space is one that reflects—and supports—our employees. We are a diverse team of committed, talented, smart, thoughtful hard-working individuals. Our core values should be manifested in our work environment.
It didn’t take long for Google to begin growing out of Bayshore—the head count was doubling in size every few months as
deals brought in new traffic, and the success of ads required a whole infrastructure of billing and business operations. Google began looking for more space in the vicinity. It leased a nearby building and moved in the business and sales operations; Googlers dubbed it the Moneyplex.
The center of gravity remained at Building Zero. It wasn’t just that Sergey and Larry were there, sharing an office loaded with hockey equipment and the shells of discarded servers. It was where the engineers were, and they were royalty at Google. Those who had gotten jobs at Google without computer science degrees—the people churning out tasks such as communications, billing, human resources, and even building facilities administration—weren’t exactly second-class citizens, but definitely a lower class of citizens. “There is an absolutely crystal-clear hierarchy at Google,” says Denise Griffin, who was hired at Google for a nontechnical job in 2000. “It’s engineers and everyone else. And if you want to be here, you have to, at some level, appreciate it.”
Still, Larry and Sergey’s mission to gather and organize all the world’s information—and the messianic buzz that came from making it happen—bound all Googlers together. At 4:30 every Friday afternoon, there was the all-hands meeting dubbed TGIF. The early TGIFs were just a way for Larry and Sergey to relay the latest news, introduce new employees, and maybe give someone a birthday wish. A highlight came when Omid Kordestani would stand up on a carton and announce the week’s financial results. The first time he was able to announce that Google made a profit, in 2001, the place went nuts.
Over the years the format of the TGIFs became more formalized, with better production values. Unless they are out of town, Larry and Sergey host the sessions. They always appear more comfortable addressing Googlers than speaking publicly. (As Google began opening offices around the country and the world, TGIFs were webcast to those locations.) They engage in teasing banter, hitting their marks with clever, if a bit nerdy, humor. First there is a greeting of Nooglers, employees who had just begun their Google careers. They wear beanies with propellers on top and get a round of applause when they sheepishly stand up to be identified. Next there is often a demo of a new program or some corporate initiative. Projected screens of thank-yous always accompany those for all the Googlers involved in the project.
The highlight of the TGIFs is always the no-holds-barred Q and A. Using an internal program called Dory, employees rate questions submitted online, with the more popular ones rising to the top. Brin and Page respond to even seemingly hostile questions with equanimity, answering them in all seriousness with no offense taken. In a typical session, someone asked why the newly hired chief financial officer had gotten such a big contract. Sergey patiently explained that the marketplace had set salaries high for someone filling that role and Google couldn’t fill it with a quality person if it underpaid. Someone else griped that the line at the café that served Indian food was too long and suggested that maybe Google should serve Indian food in additional cafés. Larry facetiously suggested that maybe the chefs should just make Indian food that didn’t taste as good.
The only time beer is regularly served in the Googleplex is after a TGIF. Nobody drinks too much, because it is only 5:30, and most people slip back to their computers for a few more hours’ work before the weekend.
By 2001, Google was looking for more space and began leasing buildings in the immediate area. In 2003, a bonanza came: an opportunity to take over the nearby campus of the troubled Silicon Graphics software company. At one time, SGI had been one of the hottest companies in the Valley. In the 1980s, it had built its headquarters as a statement of its success on the cutting edge of the effort to render the physical world into the pixilated bits of the new digital realm. Unexpected geometric shapes jutted from the buildings, as if a playful hacker had gone overboard with a CAD program, and sunlight hit the ample glass at odd angles. The four sprawling buildings encircled a long commons with a beach volleyball court and a spacious patio perfect for al fresco dining. According to a construction company that worked on the project, “This campus epitomizes virtual reality.”
But now SGI could no longer afford to occupy its beautiful complex and was looking for a company to replace it. Google’s offices were only a few hundred yards away. Salah did a walk-through and was impressed by how pristine the buildings were. He made a deal to lease the campus. (Google would later buy the property, along with the buildings that SGI had retreated to, a few blocks away on Crittenden Lane, for $319 million.)
The campus was located just east of the Permanente Creek, originally named Rio Permanente after the forces of Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza crossed it in 1776, on their way to establish a mission on what would later become San Francisco. To Googlers, though, the historic arroyo impeded shortcuts between the main buildings and later extensions of the campus to surrounding buildings that held other businesses. For a few days in 2008, some Google employees built and operated a zip line that let them coast over the ravine while hanging on to a tiny trapeze bar connected by pulleys to a cable bridging the gap. The city of Mountain View shut it down.
Salah was surprised that when Silicon Graphics occupied the building, all the cubicles had relatively high walls. And the desks were all oriented inward, with almost no one facing out. “So as you walk through the building, you couldn’t find a soul,” he says. “They were all there, you just didn’t know it. It was dead space.” His job, he felt, was to make it as alive as the company he worked for.
The key to vibrancy, he believed, was human density. Though the campus was built to accommodate around two thousand people, Silicon Graphics had had only 950 workers. Not long after Google took it over, it had more than nine hundred people in one building alone. Eventually there would be about 2,500 in those four large buildings. “We want to pack those buildings, not just because it minimizes our footprint but because of the interactions you get, just accidental stuff you overhear,” says Salah. “Walking around, you feel good about being here. And that’s what’s Googley.”
Page and Brin worked closely with Salah to make sure that the buildings expressed Google’s values. Those included design features that would promulgate not only good feeling and efficiency but their growing environmental consciousness. In Building 43, which would house the search teams as well as Page and Brin’s offices, Page insisted on sustainable and low-energy elements, including PVC-free Shaw carpets and automated solar MechoShade shades. (The building numbers on the new campus did not represent the count of Google’s structures, but were holdovers from the SGI numbering.) Page made Salah take samples of the air inside and outside the building. The results were excellent—toxic emissions well within the approved levels of the Bay Area Air Quality Management Control District and other government standards. “It was, like, .0001 parts per billion,” says Salah of the report he handed to Page. “Larry looked at it, handed it back and said, ‘Can we get this to zero?’” Google wound up building superpowerful fans to power a high-end filtration system. It made for a higher electric bill, but the air quality met Sergey and Larry’s standards. “They’re two very sensitive people,” says Salah. “They smell things most of us don’t smell.”
Until then Google’s culture had informally emerged from its founders’ beliefs that a workplace should be loaded with perks and overloaded with intellectual stimulation. The new campus formalized this inclination. The centerpiece and symbol of their view of the ideal work experience was free and abundant healthful food in an atmosphere that forged employee bonding and the sharing of innovative approaches to work. When new Googlers gathered for their orientation welcome session, the human resources person would explain that Google begins with the stomach. “We take our food very seriously—I’ve never seen an organization so fixated on food,” a human resource exec told a crowd of a hundred Nooglers in May 2009.
Brin and Page had been thinking about a free cafeteria ever since Susan Wojcicki’s house and had even talked to some local chefs about their working for the company when it moved to University Street
. One of the candidates, Charlie Ayers, had asked Sergey why a company of twelve people needed a chef. As he had told George Salah, Brin said that the company was small at the moment but was destined to be huge. Nonetheless, the Palo Alto space was too small for food services, and the idea was shelved. 2400 Bayshore had sufficient space, however, so Google set up a café. Keeping employees on-site would not only save time but allow Googlers to mingle with all the newcomers who were arriving. Google posted an opening on its website for “an innovative gourmet chef.” The ad ended with a scrumptious carrot: “The only chef job with stock options!”
Ayers won the competition for the job. Beginning in November 1999, he cooked for the Google workforce, then numbering around forty. Since his résumé included occasionally preparing meals for the Grateful Dead, press accounts often described him as a former full-time chef for the band. (Google never made much of an effort to disabuse the media of that notion, and as the years went on, Charlie was thought to have been as much a part of Deadhead culture as Mountain Girl or Rick Griffin skulls.) He began cooking in a modest café at the Nullplex, but when Google moved into its Silicon Graphics campus, a huge multilevel space in Building 40 was designated Charlie’s Café. The food stations offered a dazzling bounty from various cuisines. And if the cafés weren’t enough to stuff you, the work areas themselves had countless microkitchens filled with snack foods, vitamin-infused water and other beverages, and high-end coffees, some of them brewed in complicated espresso machines whose operation often required every bit of a Googler’s IQ.