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for CPM ads, but the underlying economics for CPC ads were far different. Advertisers paid only for the clicks they received, so the return on investment was almost always positive—search-targeted ads paid for themselves. Therefore the market for our ads was limited only by the advertiser's product inventory and production capabilities. CPC search-targeted ads were like crack for marketers. Advertisers pulled money from other direct-marketing budgets to buy as many relevant keywords as they could. We didn't need to take advertisers away from Overture—the pie was plenty big enough for both of us.

Over the weeks to come, I would check MOMA daily to get an update on the advertisers in our system. The number climbed with the steady speed of a veteran Sherpa. That was encouraging, but what we really needed were distribution partners who would display our ads. Overture had most of the big ones sewn up. But that, we determined, was something we could change.

Grow, Baby, Grow

We continued to bulk up as we prepared for our CPC cage match with Overture. Even marketing was given the okay to add staff, and I suddenly found myself with seven open positions and hundreds of résumés cluttering my inbox. I had no time to read them. The AdWords Select launch ate up chunks of my day, and our new venture into hardware, the Google Search Appliance (GSA), chewed up the rest. Our distributed-computing toolbar nibbled at the edges not already gnawed by catalog search. I had canned responses to feed user support and ongoing scraps with Marissa and Wayne over the translation console. I carried the résumés with me and read them while mopping up the residue of my daughter's stomach flu and while waiting for my endodontist to redo a root canal that had gone painfully wrong.

Still, I got a note from a product manager complaining that I couldn't be too busy to rewrite something a second time because he hadn't seen me in the office at two a.m. I wrote a scathing reply in which I pointed out I had been at work till three a.m. polishing AdWords Select and that, well ... let's just say it went on for a page and a half of painful detail about his need for urgency and how it related to his management style.

I hit Send and waited for the response. It wasn't long in coming. "Don't send this," Cindy advised me, as I knew she would. I always ran venting tirades by her before sending them to the people who had wronged me. She understood my wrath and sent a curt note on my behalf. I had plenty of wrath to go around during those hectic days, when the smallest bumps threatened to upset my carefully balanced tray of tasks. My buffer, as the engineers sometimes said, was full.

With Google's expansion, the engineers found that they had outgrown the grand experiment begun with the awkward July reorg. In January 2002, Wayne announced that the company's flat structure could not scale much further. Yes, the executives had a clear line of communication to engineering, but Google intended to hire another hundred engineers that year. They couldn't all report to Wayne. The new goal would be to bring the reporting ratio down to thirty-five to one. Senior managers would be hired primarily for their technical skills, not their managerial ability. These new directors would recognize technical talent when they saw it and, when needed, could lend a hand rather than just encouragement.

A month later Jonathan Rosenberg, freed from his prior commitments by the bankruptcy of Excite@Home, joined Google as VP of product management. He formalized the responsibilities of the department Larry had started with Salar and defined the role of product manager. The PMs would work with engineering to design and develop new products and features, handle cross-organizational communication, and determine product road maps.

There would soon be many PMs, with many advanced degrees from the world's top business schools, law schools, and engineering programs. Our cultural evolution would take a giant leap from single-celled amoeba to vertebrate, from anarchy and individual autonomy to the controlled