I'm Feeling Lucky Read Free Page B

viewed as the best search engine available, had never found a trace of her, so my expectations were low when I hit the enter key.
    And there she was.
    Google listed her current contact information as the first result. I tried more searches. They all worked better than they had on AltaVista. I no longer begrudged Google the stationery and the stamp.
    Other signs pointed to something out of the ordinary. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins were the Montagues and Capulets of Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) firms. They had enviable success records individually—Yahoo, Amazon, Apple, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems—and an intense rivalry that usually kept them from investing in the same startup. Yet together they had poured twenty-five million dollars into the fledgling company. What did Google possess that induced them to set aside their ancient grudge?
    I looked for clues in the bios of Google's founders and management team. An abundance of Stanford grads and advanced degrees, which wasn't uncommon. But members of Stanford's faculty had even invested their own money in the new venture—that was different. I didn't know diddly about search technology, but people who presumably did seemed to think Google had potential. When you're burning with startup fever, it doesn't take much to feed the visions playing in your head. So when Google agreed to interview me, I printed out some fresh résumés, tossed my briefcase in our old Taurus, and headed north to Mountain View to check out the new frontier.

A First Encounter
     
    How does one interview for a job at a startup in Silicon Valley? I was well practiced by the time I pulled into Google's parking lot. It was another warm Bay Area November, and I wasn't surprised to see one section of the asphalt roped off with police tape and a roller hockey net at each end. The beige building and a herd of others just like it grazed in verdant fields interspersed with tasteful fountains and ambiguous sculptures. When I entered the first floor of the building, there were arrows printed on copy paper pointing the way to the stairs, which I followed to the second floor.
    The curly-haired young receptionist smiled at me. I looked at her and recalled tales of secretaries walking off with millions from early stock options. Would she be one of them? She guided me to a small room decorated with a nine-foot whiteboard, a standard-issue circular table, and several inflated rubber balls large enough to sit on. Nothing here suggested rivers of currency dammed and waiting to burst forth in a torrential IPO. It was just a conference room in a generic office building on a lazy late-autumn afternoon. As I sat idly patting a three-foot ball, a number of folks on the business side of the company straggled in and introduced themselves.
    Susan Wojcicki, who owned the garage that had been Google's first headquarters, had left Intel to join her tenants' company as a marketing manager. Cindy McCaffrey had come over from Apple to be director of public relations. Together they walked me through a general introduction to Google with the sort of positive energy that bubbled over everywhere in those days. At least they had facts on which to build their optimism.
Time
had written up the site, traffic was growing by leaps and bounds, and Google had ample financial backing, though no immediate source of revenue. That would come in time, they assured me. They asked about my experience, especially with viral marketing, which Cindy indicated was important to the company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
    "Oh sure, I've done viral," I assured them, whipping through my bulging portfolio to show them the "Nerd for the New Millennium" contest I'd worked up with the Tech Museum and the oval SV.com stickers the
Merc
had sent local venture capitalists to stick on their Porsches. It wasn't exactly "viral," but it was what I had.
    They were equally orthogonal in answering my questions about Google's business model and