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Sergey showed up wearing roller hockey gear: gym shorts, a t-shirt, and inline skates. He had obviously been playing hard. I had known better than to wear a tie, but he took office casual to a new level.† I sat back and resumed toying with one of the rubber balls, feeling so relaxed that I accidentally removed its stopper, causing half the air inside to rush out with a hiss. Sergey found that amusing. He pored over my résumé and began peppering me with questions. "What promotion did you do that was most effective?" "What metrics did you use to measure it?" "What types of viral marketing did you do?" "What was your GPA?" I was doing fine until that last one. I just looked at him.

"My GPA?" I hadn't thought about my grade point average since the day they handed me my diploma in 1981. And given that my alma mater had allowed me to take as many classes as I wanted with a pass/fail option, I'm not sure I ever knew what my GPA was. I laughed, thinking Sergey was joking, but even after the company offered me a job, the HR people kept pestering me for a college transcript and my SAT scores. It was a classic Google moment. Your SAT score was the measure of your intellectual capability; your GPA represented your ability to execute on that potential. The value of your future contribution to Google could be plotted using just those two data points.

Sergey's desire to reduce every decision to an equation would cause me a fair amount of frustration in the years to come. While it forced me to discipline my thinking, it also went against my deeply held conviction that some things are not expressible with an algorithm, no matter how carefully derived.

"How much do you think a company our size should spend on marketing?" Sergey asked me. From his earlier questions, it was easy to guess what he wanted to hear.

"I don't think at this stage you should spend much at all," I said. "You can get good exposure with viral marketing and small budgets. Shooting gerbils out of a cannon in a Superbowl spot* is not a very effective strategy for building a brand."

Sergey nodded his agreement, then asked about my six months in Siberia, casually switching to Russian to see how much I had picked up. Finally, he leaned forward and fired his best shot, what he came to call "the hard question." "I'm going to give you five minutes," he announced. "When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know." He then rolled out of the room toward the snack area.

I looked at Cindy. "He's very curious about everything," she said. "You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it's something you understand really well."

I reached for a piece of scrap paper as my mind raced. What complicated thing did I know well enough to describe to Sergey? Diaper changing didn't seem appropriate. How newspapers are printed? Kind of dull. I decided to go with the general theory of marketing, which was fresh in my mind because I'd only learned it recently.

One of my dirty little secrets was a complete lack of academic preparation for the business world. Instead of statistics and economics, I'd taken planetary geology, Latin, and Spenserian verse. Fortunately, Annie Skeet, my boss at the Mercury News, had a Harvard MBA and a desire to drive some business theory into my thick skull. She had given me a stack of her old textbooks along with strong hints that I should read them. I had found a couple of titles interesting, including Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy and David Aaker's books on branding.

I began regurgitating everything I could remember onto the paper in front of me: the five P's (or was it six?), the four M's, barriers to entry, differentiation on quality or price. By the time Sergey came back, I had enough to talk for ten minutes and was confident I could fill any holes with the three B's (Buckets of Baffling Bullshit). I went to the whiteboard and furiously drew circles and squares and unleashed arrows like Legolas.