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"Omid! Omid! Omid!" we chanted.

Omid was very popular at Google. He always came to TGIF prepared with a smile, a joke, and a stack of numbers that led to a very happy conclusion.

As soon as we had an OKR process in place in early 2000, Larry and Sergey gave Omid a goal: he should book half a million dollars in ad revenue by the end of the first quarter. My assumption was that Larry and Sergey wanted to make Omid spontaneously combust. It was, after all, only the first period in which our original advertising program had been active (well before AdWords had launched). Larry and Sergey didn't count toward Omid's goal any leads or promises of revenue that might not materialize; they only cared about actual dollars in the bank. Omid had fewer than a half dozen people in his entire department, and Google was unknown outside Silicon Valley. We had engineering issues and incomplete tools and flaky infrastructure, and our competition was cutting deals at deep discounts.

Still, Omid gave indications that the numbers looked good when he presented his updates at our weekly TGIFs. It wasn't until the end of the quarter, however, that we saw just how good-looking the numbers actually were.

Omid stood up and, with classic showman's timing, talked about the difficulty of reaching the team's aggressive goal just months after launching a new product. He showed charts with illegible footnotes and spreadsheets filled with numbers too tiny to read. With all the challenges his team faced, he told us, we had been lucky to secure any new revenue at all. Then, with a grin and a flourish, he revealed that Google had booked six hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars for the quarter. That revenue was already in-house. The sales team had secured more than a million dollars in overall revenue commitments, putting the company on track for a great second quarter as well. The applause was instantaneous and prolonged. Our salespeople, I thought, were amazing.

Three months later, Omid and his team beat their goal again.

The third time around, we started calling Omid a "sandbagger." Sergey mockingly accused him of underestimating what his team could achieve, even though his goal had increased by leaps and bounds each quarter. Omid feigned shock and denied any culpability. We all took up the charge, though some new employees didn't understand why we were harassing the person who had given us such great news. It became a TGIF tradition. In Omid's absence one week, Sergey gave the sales report. He pretended to look over Omid's spreadsheets and materials carefully.

"Let me summarize," he said at last, looking over toward the sales team, imitating Omid. "We're sandbagging." The room cracked up.

The table had its own back story.

When our weekly meeting outgrew the hallway outside Larry and Sergey's office, we relocated to Charlie's café downstairs. The café's acoustics made it hard to hear, so for his presentation, Omid climbed on a chair, then stepped up onto a long lunch table. He had just concluded his remarks when the table gave way. There was a loud crash as the metal legs spontaneously folded and an involuntary "Ohhhhh!" from the crowd as Omid found himself momentarily standing on air. With surprising agility, he executed an acrobatic twist and landed squarely on the toes of his black Italian shoes. The room erupted with applause.

"And he nails the dismount!" I shouted.

After that, chants of "Table! Table!" greeted Omid at every TGIF, and he gamely obliged. Eventually someone placed a burlap bag filled with sand on top of the table, and Omid, impeccably attired, planted his loafers firmly upon it to let us know that yes, despite the overwhelming odds, his heroic sales team had again delivered a record-breaking quarter. For Google's shareholder employees, the story never got old in the telling.

Because Google was so forthcoming with its financial information, not only at TGIF but also on MOMA (the intranet), there was never an inflection point at which we suddenly discovered we possessed wealth beyond our wildest dreams. Anyone