I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [216]
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* I felt this even more strongly the first time I visited the Google doctor, for whom the company had converted an office into a full examining room. It's unsettling to walk past the cubicles of your coworkers on your way to a physical.
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* Smith was unbeatable. He once challenged me to a game in which he used only his toes to operate the controller. He won, literally hands down.
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* Charlie always offered at least one vegetarian option for the main entrée.
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* Vasanth Sridharan at Businessinsider.com, April 23, 2008.
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* A cached page is a copy that Google stores in its index when it crawls the web. It's not the live page hosted on the site itself, but more like a photo Google takes for reference. Because the cached page is hosted by Google, it's available even if the original site goes down or the content of the page changes.
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* A term I picked up during my six-month stay in Siberia. It means "a dog's nightmare."
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* Sergey may have been referring to his own April Fools' joke, an all-staff memo announcing that the board had raised Google's stock price from $1.20 to $4.01, which led one employee to borrow money to buy his shares. The fact that Sergey sent his note on March 31 made it all the funnier—to him, anyway.
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* Deb Kelly looks back on this as a way "to get all the ideas out there. Why not outsource it to Mars? Anything is possible." She ruefully admits, "I could never talk about space tethers very convincingly."
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* Devin was one of the few hires who made it through Google's screening process without a college degree, an accomplishment he attributes in part to his ability to quickly brainstorm ideas in his interview and in part to the fact that he let Sergey know that he "didn't have a big book of rules to apply to our brand."
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* Some Googlers celebrated their fourth anniversary by wearing a vest to work. Others quit. One engineer with thousands of vested options left the company in anticipation of a quick IPO and a shower of gold. Instead, the company didn't go public until more than a year later, by which time he was whiling away his days surfing the net, living off his girlfriend, and subsisting on ramen noodles.
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* An annual gathering of thousands of free spirits who—often clad in little more than bandannas and body paint—celebrate technology and creativity by assembling unique structures and burning them to the ground.
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† "Google Doodle" originally referred to a multipart logo that changed each day to tell a story, though people now refer to even a single altered homepage logo as a Doodle.
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* Hardware designer Will Whitted once complained, "I hate it when I tell Urs I'm working twenty-four hours a day, and he says, 'Well, I guess you'll have to work nights, too.'"
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* Urs claims this inflection point happened for Google sometime in 2003.
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* A handful of true search scientists—most notably Amit Singhal and Monika Henzinger—did join the company early on, but they were exceptions. Google also hired specialists to build Windows apps and to manage its Oracle database when Larry became convinced auditors would not certify a financial system we built ourselves.
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* Google hired a bushel of Bens. I'll refer to each by his last name so you can keep them straight.
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* John Ince, "Inside Search Engines," Upside, May 2000.
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† Go.com grew out of the merger of Infoseek and Disney's online unit and featured content from Disney and ABC properties.
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* Larry and Sergey took leaves from their Stanford PhD programs to start Google, to the chagrin of their professorial parents. Sergey mentioned that his mom would greet good news about Google with the question "So will you be able to finish your degree now?"
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* For "miscellaneous." MISC was open to any Googler who had the patience to read it.
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* Susan Wojcicki, Marissa Mayer, Jeff Dean, Salar Kamangar, and Urs Hölzle were