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Larry's face lit up as if all the eyebrow bouncing had earned him a free ball and a bonus round.

I smiled too, but when I stopped, they didn't. A doubt crept in. They weren't ... they couldn't be ... surely they didn't mean that as a serious suggestion? I began the long trip from incredulity to denial to sputtering refutation based on logic, only to be sent packing until I could come up with a data-based argument proving their idea lacked merit.

Staking out extreme positions and making staffers fight their way to a safe haven of sanity seemed to amuse our founders. They got to watch forehead veins throb and palms drip sweat as PMs, ops people, and engineers probed carefully, attempting to keep a grip on logic while cutting through a thicket of distractions to defuse explosive ideas.

"Google was the first company I worked at where I had that experience," project manager Deb Kelly recalls. "Where you're thinking, 'That's nuts. That's crazy. That's dumb,' and then thinking about it for a while and going, 'Actually, that might be really, really smart—hard, but really, really smart.'"

The madness was not without method. Not only did Larry and Sergey's hyperbolic proposals force us to reason more tightly, but starting at the ideological antipodes exploited the full value of the intelligence in the room. After Larry or Sergey made one of their outrageous suggestions, nothing that followed would seem inconceivable. To sort the improbable from the impossible, we needed to pay attention and to argue facts, not suppositions or conventions. If we began with only "acceptable" solutions that had been tried before, we would never uncover the state-changing breakthroughs that destroyed worlds and raised new ones from their rubble.

Urs understood this better than most. "Larry and Sergey had an expectation that things would be watered down along the way," he explained. "Starting with something that's more ambitious will get you something that's reasonable. But if you don't put the goal post way out there, people are already taking fewer risks and are less ambitious about how big the idea should be."

It was another reason Google valued intelligence over experience. "In the best case," Urs said, "you had someone who was very excited and didn't know what was impossible and got really far. The big question was always, 'Can you do it cheaply enough for this to actually be affordable?' Maybe, but without trying it and measuring and doing the next iteration, you're not going to find out."

I felt sorry for new Googlers who stepped into the reality abattoir for the first time and looked around the room with naked-at-school-nightmare eyes, trying to see if this was some cruel initiation rite. If you were a goal-oriented, eager-to-please new staffer, what did you say when Sergey insisted, "We should really forget about [whatever topic was under discussion] and focus on building space tethers?"*

Meetings weren't the only place ideas went to die. If the founders didn't like a proposal, they might consign it to what PR director David Krane called the "dead letter office": "You'd ship something into the ether and there was no response. That was your way of knowing you'd probably missed."

It didn't help that when Larry and Sergey did respond to our ideas, their responses were often ambiguous. "If they liked something they'd say, 'It doesn't seem too sucky,'" recalls facilities manager George Salah. "When they pushed back on something, they'd say, 'Hmmmm, that seems suboptimal' or use some technical way of saying something between yes and no. They never gave a clear decision."

When I took copy to Sergey for approval, he would say, "It's cute. I like it" or "No. That's not very Googley."

Once I spent days with my team developing a full rationale for an ad campaign, based on what we understood about the target audience and their motivations. Sergey glanced at the layouts, frowned, and said, "I think you need to think about it some more."

"Is it the concept