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They had no objection to the rest, including my favorite, "You don't need a suit to be serious." I hated neckties. I hated ironing shirts.* I hated scratchy trousers and shoes that pinched. I wanted to elevate my sartorial disdain to the level of a corporate value and, God bless Google, they were willing to do it.

Not all items on the list would age equally well. In fact, Google amended it not long ago to make it clear that doing "one thing really, really well" could be extended to cover products like online chat and financial news. I knew that Google would ultimately outgrow search alone, but search was the battle we were fighting at the time and the way our users defined us. Who were we to reject the brand they had created in our name?

Only one point gave me pause: "You can make money without doing evil." It was at the heart of our response to Overture, but I felt uncomfortable talking about our desire not to prosper at the expense of our souls. I thought it could be perceived as naive and would invite criticism every time we didn't live up to our moral code. It also went against another core value, one I hadn't listed: "Underpromise and overdeliver." Up to that point, we had always been careful not to overstate our accomplishments or brag about what we had up our sleeves.

We never boasted about our willingness to sacrifice ourselves to make good things happen for partners, advertisers, or users, and we rarely talked about what we might do for them in the future, but we strove to exceed their expectations. Shutting down Google.com for Netscape had been a prime example. While Larry and Sergey would negotiate every penny out of a potential client's pocket, our goal was to give added value in return. That attitude was uncommon among tech companies. Microsoft, in particular, gained notoriety as the issuer of vast quantities of vaporware, products that they touted as industry standards, but which came to market much later than originally projected, if at all. It's easy to understand why companies did this—it was a way to lay claim to new markets and kept aspiring players from entering them.

We abhorred vaporware. Though recently Google has preannounced products and even whole industries it intends to revolutionize, in its early days the company kept launches secret and downplayed features. We wanted people to discover some things on their own. We'd launch a calculator and let users figure out it could tell them the number of hands in a fathom. We'd launch a spell checker that offered suggestions not just for common nouns but for the names of people in the news.

"Underpromise and overdeliver" became as important a mantra to us as "Don't be evil."

Eventually, users and analysts began speculating about what Google might develop next. Would it be a phone? A travel service? A carbonated beverage? The rumors were rife, and the lack of confirmation or denial from Google gave competitors pause. Google was no longer just a search engine. It was a technology company that solved hard problems. That made the addition of Google's name to any product plausible.

Understating our accomplishments could be frustrating at times, especially for salespeople. AdWords ads got up to fourteen times the clickthrough rate of untargeted banner display ads, but we only let sales reps tell clients they were three times better. We wanted to sound realistic to potential customers and keep our true performance hidden from competitors. If we delivered double or triple what we promised, who would complain?

But there was no way to overdeliver on not being evil—and there were an infinite number of ways to fall short of that goal. Evil, as an operating principle, was a common discussion topic around our cubicles. In late 2001, in Silicon Valley at least, many saw Microsoft as the primary practitioner of the dark arts in technology, using their monopoly power to corral innovative startups that might turn their Windows cash cow into hamburger helper.

The "Don't be evil" mantra had already taken root within Google when I