I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [192]
"If the stock goes to thirty dollars," I mused, "I'll be worth X. If it goes to fifty, I'll be worth Y. Could it really go to fifty? What's Yahoo at? Ohmigod. What if it went to a hundred dollars a share? Nah. That could never happen." It was a fun game to play. I tried to wipe the goofy smile off my face by the time I got back to the office, but sometimes it would reappear of its own accord.
The office changed, too. We had completed our purchase of SGI's corporate headquarters in July 2003. In January 2004, it was corporate marketing's turn to follow engineering to our new home. I packed up my boxes on Friday and on Monday went to work in building 41. Not 42, which was where engineering lived, but next door and accessible by a series of elevated bridges and walkways that would have made a giant hamster feel right at home.
There weren't many corporate marketing folks left to move. Jonathan's product-management division had absorbed our internationalization group and our market researcher. I still managed Allegra, who was now our special events coordinator, and Dylan Casey, a marketing coordinator whose previous job had been cycling with Lance Armstrong on the US Postal Service racing team.
David Krane's PR group had grown considerably, with representatives in Google offices around the world, and Karen White, the webmaster, now had a much larger staff as well. I didn't mind that the branding group had not kept pace. Managing people always felt harder to me than doing the work myself. I liked sitting in my darkened office with headphones on, thinking about our brand and how to make it shine. I also knew that at the rate the product-management team was adding PMMs—marketing managers who worked with the product team much as I had—my fate would be either induction into the collective or elimination as a redundancy. Organizations grow. They change. I didn't worry too much about it. I loved my job, but I had stock options and they were fully vested.
We had come a long way from our cramped quarters in the original Googleplex, with its cereal bins relabeled to read "Larry-O's," "Raisin Brin," and "porn Flakes," its intimate café with an unused cash register, and its walk-in-closet gym.
Our new facility had everything. There was a "Welcome home" pillow on my chair when I came in. We had a sand volleyball court, a bocce ball area, clean locker rooms, and an enormous café that doubled as our TGIF meeting space and included an upstairs balcony and an outdoor barbeque patio. There were a garden plot and an adjacent grassy field for Frisbee or soccer. There was even a mystery floor with a canted roof and oddly shaped windows creating a visual effect that nauseated the legal department staffers housed there. They quickly set up a portable bar and scheduled regular cocktail hours to ameliorate the effects.
There were snack rooms on every floor, foosball, Ping-Pong, and video games. Googlers brought in caged birds, threw camouflage netting over their cubes, and installed a traditional red British telephone booth purchased on eBay. We had massage chairs, massage rooms, and Japanese toilets featuring heated seats, "front cleansing," and built-in dryers. We had a stable housing a fleet of Segways and a video display Amit Patel created to show a spinning Earth with sample queries floating up from it in real time—each color-coded by language. And we had an enormous whiteboard on which any passing Googler could update "Google's secret plan" for taking over the world. It was filled with rumors, fake products, cartoons, and puns. Reporters sometimes asked if it was for real.
I always laughed. If it had been real,