I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [11]
"That is pretty cool," I gushed, but not about the roller coaster. I'd already noticed that Jay worked what, to me, were reasonable hours and left in the late afternoon to pick up his kids. Despite the prevailing conception of startups as Silicon Valley's sweatshops, Jay's kick-back attitude convinced me I'd be able to work at Google, help raise our children, and even find time for my own personal development. Pretty cool indeed.
It was a happy fantasy.
My life balance was about to get knocked on its inner ear. In less than a year I would be working sixteen-hour days and Jay would depart Google to pursue personal goals that were at odds with those of the company.
What were Google's goals in late 1999? Hell if I knew. We were a search engine. What did search engines do? They searched. I assumed that we wanted to be the best damn search engine on the planet. Even better than AltaVista. It seemed unlikely we'd ever be a giant like Yahoo, given their head start, but maybe someday we'd be big enough to make Inktomi share the market for supplying portals with technology. There were no mouse pads imprinted with our mission statement or motivational posters on the walls urging us to surpass our sales targets as there had been at the Merc. If Googlers, or anyone else, had a clear vision of the company's future, they kept it hidden. And not just from me.
"I had lunch with Sergey and another engineer and it was clear they had a search engine," said engineer Ed Karrels, who in 1999 was trying to decide if he should leave SGI for a job at Google, "but everybody and their brother had a search engine in those days. I asked, 'Where are you going with this? How will you make money?' And Sergey said, 'Well ..., we'll figure something out.' I asked, 'Do you already have a plan figured out and you're collecting smart people to make it happen?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's pretty much it.'" Very reassuring.
I had worked for a startup in the eighties, joining a group of former auditors with an idea that would revolutionize health-care marketing. They set up shop in San Francisco next to a former garage that now housed a Chinese restaurant. The place was soaked in adrenaline and constantly shifting direction. Change, change, change. Charge ahead. No back. I left after three months, and a few weeks later the company disappeared. I learned that hyperactivity wasn't the same as productivity. Google, however, gave off a different vibe.
A big part of that was the people I met.
"Hi, I'm Jim," said the guy who came by to give me my laptop and set up my phone. "Jim Reese. I should have this done in a jiffy." Something about him reminded me of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man: the open and friendly attitude, the hair parted way over on one side, the whiff of geekiness I detected as he crawled under my desk, whipped out a screwdriver, and began adeptly fiddling with one of the jacks.
I later learned that Google had hired Jim as a systems administrator (sysadmin) because the early engineers were all coders and not so good with hardware. It wasn't what Jim had been trained to do at Harvard, at Yale Medical School, or in his neurosurgery residency at Stanford, but somewhere along the line he had developed an interest in computer networking and had ended up on the phone with Urs Hölzle, Google's head of engineering. Recruiters from other companies had spent their interview time selling him on the jobs they were offering. Not Urs.
"Urs said nothing about coming to the company," Jim recalls. "Every single question was like, 'Tell me how many bits there are in a netmask for a slash 28 network.' Then he started drilling down from there." That focus on the technology had convinced Jim to sign on.
The day in June 1999 when Jim started as Google employee number eighteen, his orientation took less than a minute. "Here's your space over