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By Root 1986 0

come over from the Palo Alto office. Before that she had been a Stanford student. When I finally met her, I was struck by the intensity and scope of her interests. If everyone else at Google was a hundred-watt bulb illuminating a single corner of the company, Marissa was a flashing neon sign, casting light and shadow in all colors across the entire Googleplex. Trying to keep up with her could induce seizures. Her primary role was as a software engineer, but she was temporarily working on UI design. She had uncovered research indicating that sans-serif fonts were easier to read, so she and engineer Craig Silverstein had decided to change the results font to Verdana. It didn't happen because Karen and I had suggested a move to sans serif in our guidelines. In fact, Marissa may not have even seen our proposal.

"It would have been nice to know that engineering was already working on UI," I griped to Karen. It undermined what we had done and made me question our internal communication. No one else seemed terribly upset, so I dismissed the faint alarm bells and chalked it up to the newness of the marketing organization. It was great that our engineers made improvements. I just wanted to be sure we wouldn't be caught by surprise when they launched them.

I was equally sanguine about my first glimpse of the way the two departments approached problems. We in marketing wrote proposals, made suggestions, and looked for broad formal approval before moving ahead one step at a time. Our engineers made quick data-based decisions and implemented them. If data supported a particular option, they rationalized, it was the right choice to make. Data didn't lie. If the numbers said changing A to B would improve product X, why not do it now? This mindset drove much of the urgency at Google. Engineers knew how to make things better, and every hour, every minute, every second we delayed improvements, users had to endure sub-optimal interactions with our site. That was unacceptable.

I would discover, however, that data does lie. Sometimes the method of collecting it is flawed, sometimes it's misinterpreted, and sometimes it provides only part of the answer. Take the change to Verdana. While the new font looked great on certain PCs and certain browsers, it rendered horribly on others, most notably those used by America Online customers—essentially making Google unusable for millions of people. Marissa and the engineers hadn't checked it on that platform. That problem was quickly corrected, but even though I supported the move to a sans-serif font, I was left with a healthy skepticism about the ability of numbers to tell the whole story, a loss of faith that I alone appeared to experience within Google's kabala of data-based divinity.

"We Accept You"

TGIF was the four-thirty Friday afternoon meeting at which new Googlers (or "Nooglers," as I would dub them) introduced themselves and the founders shared the important news of the week. When I arrived for my debut, the entire company was gathered in the hallway outside Larry and Sergey's office, leaning against walls, sitting on rubber balls, and sprawling on the floor. Urs's dog Yoshka sniffed at Susan's newborn son, who was asleep in his car seat in front of a wall of Sony monitors stacked in their shipping cases.

Larry, dressed in black slacks and a long-sleeved, dark blue shirt buttoned to the collar, stepped to the front of the crowd. He carried himself as if his armature ran on a woefully underpowered processor—stiff, awkward moves and self-conscious grins—as if he reminded himself to smile and then manually executed the command set to make it happen. Lift the edges of your mouth. Stretch your lips back. Crinkle your eyes. It made him seem painfully self-conscious. I found myself rooting for him to compile successfully, though sometimes he got stuck halfway through a sequence and stood leaning to one side with a half-grin frozen on his face. Sergey was more fluid, athletic, acrobatic. Bouncy, even. He laughed easily and seemed to always have an eye out for a railing he could vault or a