The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [65]
I could see how people might get used to this.
The purpose of that particular trip was fund-raising, mostly—in preparation for my general election campaign, several friends and supporters had organized events for me in L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco. But the most memorable part of the trip was a visit that I paid to the town of Mountain View, California, a few miles south of Stanford University and Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the search engine company Google maintains its corporate headquarters.
Google had already achieved iconic status by mid-2004, a symbol not just of the growing power of the Internet but of the global economy’s rapid transformation. On the drive down from San Francisco, I reviewed the company’s history: how two Stanford Ph.D. candidates in computer science, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had collaborated in a dorm room to develop a better way to search the web; how in 1998, with a million dollars raised from various contacts, they had formed Google, with three employees operating out of a garage; how Google figured out an advertising model—based on text ads that were nonintrusive and relevant to the user’s search—that made the company profitable even as the dot-com boom went bust; and how, six years after the company’s founding, Google was about to go public at stock prices that would make Mr. Page and Mr. Brin two of the richest people on earth.
Mountain View looked like a typical suburban California community—quiet streets, sparkling new office parks, unassuming homes that, because of the unique purchasing power of Silicon Valley residents, probably ran a cool million or more. We pulled in front of a set of modern, modular buildings and were met by Google’s general counsel, David Drummond, an African American around my age who’d made the arrangements for my visit.
“When Larry and Sergey came to me looking to incorporate, I figured they were just a couple of really smart guys with another start-up idea,” David said. “I can’t say I expected all this.”
He took me on a tour of the main building, which felt more like a college student center than an office—a café on the ground floor, where the former chef of the Grateful Dead supervised the preparation of gourmet meals for the entire staff; video games and a Ping-Pong table and a fully equipped gym. (“People spend a lot of time here, so we want to keep them happy.”) On the second floor, we passed clusters of men and women in jeans and T-shirts, all of them in their twenties, working intently in front of their computer screens, or sprawled on couches and big rubber exercise balls, engaged in animated conversation.
Eventually we found Larry Page, talking to an engineer about a software problem. He was dressed like his employees and, except for a few traces of early gray in his hair, didn’t look any older. We spoke about Google’s mission—to organize all of the world’s information into a universally accessible, unfiltered, and usable form—and the Google site index, which already included more than six billion web pages. Recently the company had launched a new web-based email system with a built-in search function; they were working on technology that would allow you to initiate a voice search over the telephone, and had already started the Book Project, the goal of which was to scan every book ever published into a web-accessible format, creating a virtual library that would store the entirety of human knowledge.
Toward the end of the tour, Larry led me to a room where a three-dimensional image of the earth rotated on a large flat-panel monitor. Larry asked the young Indian American engineer who was working nearby to explain what we were looking at.
“These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now,” the engineer said. “Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle this way”—he caused the screen to alter—“you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.”
The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing