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Here his eyes took on a faraway look and his words came faster. Sensors are really cheap and getting cheaper. Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data.

Everything you've ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.

Our conversation ended on that note. Not once did the subject of making money come up. Not once did he talk about advertising revenue or syndication or beating Overture or CPC or our new Search Appliance.

I was probably a naive middle-aged dreamer, because looking back at it now, I see there was nothing truly extraordinary about what Larry described. But when I walked out of his office I believed that for the first time in my life I had been in the presence of a true visionary. It wasn't just the specifics of what he saw, but the passion and conviction he conveyed that made you believe Larry would actually achieve what he described. And that when that day came, he would already be thinking another fifty years ahead. My respect for our two capricious, obstinate, provocative, and occasionally juvenile founders increased tenfold that day.

There were other glimpses of Larry's thinking. He and Eric shared a list of possible strategies that included Google as the publisher of all content, where users would pay us and we would reimburse the creators of everything from books to movies to music. Google as a provider of market research and business intelligence based on what we knew about the world. Google as an infrastructure platform and communications provider tying email and web data together. Google as the leader in machine intelligence backed by all the world's data and massive computing power that learned as it went along.

He had no small plans.

Eric, on the other hand, was the voice of corporate pragmatism. These grand schemes would have to be paid for somehow. "Any chart that goes up and to the right is good," he assured us. And, "I like to watch cash in the bank." I got the impression he shared my concern for all the things that could go wrong.

One fear I knew Eric had was of clowns. Specifically, the bozos who showed up at a company when it reached a certain size and bloated it with bureaucracy and bogged it down in mediocrity. Google's hiring guidelines explicitly stated we should only add people smarter than we were.

That's why we started running a line on the homepage that said, "You're brilliant. We're hiring." The engineers loved it.

I hated it. To me it reeked of arrogance and went counter to our "say little, do lots" brand strategy. I had opposed it when we ran it previously, but Marissa insisted the data showed it garnered more résumés than any of our other job-related lines. I got nowhere pointing out that a minuscule percentage of the people reading it on the homepage would be qualified to work at Google. Larry and Urs were willing to waste a few hundred million impressions to reach the dozen or so people they might consider hiring.

The page at the other end of the link had been written entirely by Jeff Dean. The word "exceptional" appeared three times in the first paragraph, and "problems" showed up four times in the next two sentences. I offered to smooth out the rough edges and nearly gave Wayne Rosing a heart attack.

"No!" he exclaimed. "Leave it alone! Please!" It was a page written for geeks, and if Jeff, our own über-geek, liked it, marketing's touch would only taint it. Cindy encouraged me not to let engineering roll over our department, so I sat down with Jeff and went through the copy line by line, making helpful suggestions. As I made the edits, Jeff said he liked most of them—then, as soon as I left, he undid them all. He knew what appealed to him and saw exactly how it would appeal to others like him.

It would be easy to assume from this anecdote that Jeff thought he was brilliant and was arrogant about it. That wasn't the case at all. In fact, Paul Bucheit told me, Jeff kept everyone humble. "You can't get up and be an asshole about being smart," Paul explained,