Charlie Ayers: A lot of people internally in the company were really happy to see him coming because he was now the official old guy. Before Schmidt, you’d look around the building for an adult, and you’re not seeing too many of them.
Heather Cairns: One of his first days at work he did this sort of public address with the company and he said, “I want you to know who your real competition is.” He said, “It’s Microsoft.” And everyone went, What?
Terry Winograd: I can remember some higher-level meetings I was in, which were about what Google could do that would stay under Microsoft’s radar. In fact, “Canada” was the code word for Microsoft, because it was big and up north, right? There was basically a sense that if Microsoft decided Google was a threat they could squash it, and they wanted to make sure they didn’t trigger that reaction.
Ev Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium: There was quite a bit of angst and existential concern that the next version of Windows was going to have search built into the OS. And how were we going to compete with that?
Heather Cairns: So, I remember thinking, Huh, wow. He thinks we’re a threat to Microsoft. Are you kidding me? So I think then, that speech made me realize that maybe we had more gravity than I understood.
Marissa Mayer: It was a bigger vision than we had really tangibly talked about before. That was a big moment for us.
Douglas Edwards: If you read Larry and Sergey’s original paper that they wrote at Stanford, where they talked about creating a search engine, they specifically said that advertising was wrong and bad and it would inherently corrupt the search engine if you sold advertising. So they were adamantly opposed to the notion of having advertising on Google.
Ray Sidney: Then people started reading about how much money was being brought in to various other companies by search advertising, and it was kind of decided that we were leaving money on the table.
Douglas Edwards: There was a lot of pressure to generate revenue, and so Larry and Sergey decided that advertising doesn’t have to be evil—if it’s actually useful and relevant.
Paul Buchheit, inventor of Gmail: Sometime in early 2000, there was a meeting to decide on the company’s values. They invited a collection of people who had been there for a while. I was sitting there trying to think of something that would be really different, and not one of these usual “strive for excellence” sort of statements. I also wanted something that, once you get it in there, would be hard to take out.
Brad Templeton: “Don’t be evil” was the phrase.
Paul Buchheit: It just sort occurred to me.
Sergey Brin: We have tried to define precisely what it means to be a force for good—always do the right, ethical thing. Ultimately, “Don’t be evil” seems the easiest way to summarize it.
Paul Buchheit: It’s also a bit of a jab at the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time were, in our opinion, kind of exploiting the users to some extent. They were tricking them by selling search results—which we considered a questionable thing to do, because people didn’t realize that they were ads.
Sergey Brin: We think that’s a slippery slope.
Brad Templeton: By that point, they had become a pretty big company.
Heather Cairns: We were moving into the old Silicon Graphics campus, where there’s still old Silicon Graphics people working there, and they weren’t too happy to see us.
Marissa Mayer: At that point S.G.I. was doing poorly, so there were about 50 people on that whole campus.
Jim Clark, founder of S.G.I., then Netscape: It was a sinking ship.
Heather Cairns: We are like, “Yay! Here are our pool tables and our candy! Yay! We’re Google!” And they’re looking out the windows at us playing volleyball and they’re like, “Fuck you!”
Jim Clark: They were upset that they had missed out on being part of Netscape.
Marissa Mayer: We’d been so disrespectful—loud and annoying.
Heather Cairns: We weren’t trying to be disrespectful. We were just stupid. We didn’t have a sensitivity to the fact that those people probably wouldn’t have jobs in a few months. They were clear on that. And they’re just watching the new blood come in—happy, eager, just bouncing off the walls.
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter: Google was a weird place—like a weird kid land. Adults worked there, but there were all these big, colorful, bouncy balls. Eric Schmidt had a twisty playground slide that he could exit his office from—which now seems almost perverted.
Heather Cairns: I did the employee manual and I modeled our culture after Stanford—because that’s where most of our people were coming from.
Sean Parker, founder of Napster, first president of Facebook: Google really did set themselves up to get great engineers by trying to make their environment feel as similar to grad school as possible. Google could make the case: “Oh, don’t worry, this is going to feel a lot like when you were a researcher. This isn’t like selling out and going into the corporate world, you’re still an academic, you just work at Google now.” They ended up getting a lot of really smart people because of that.
Biz Stone: Google was not a normal place at all. There was just all kinds of weird stuff going on. I would just walk around and check stuff out like the kid in Willy Wonka going around the chocolate factory.
Heather Cairns: Larry and Sergey would be doing crap with LEGOs, building stuff with LEGOs.
Larry Page: LEGO Mindstorms. They’re little LEGO kits that have a computer built in. They’re like robots with sensors.
Heather Cairns: I remember them making a rubber wheel and moving it over paper. I was like, “What are you doing?” “Well, we want to scan every book and publication and put it on the Internet.” I’d say, “Are you crazy?” And they’d say, “The only thing that holds us back is turning pages.”
Biz Stone: One day I walk into a room and there was just a whole bunch of people dazed out on these automated contraptions with lights and foot pedals and books. And I was like, “What are you guys doing?” They said, “We are scanning every book published in the world.” And I was like, “O.K. Carry on.” And then I distinctly remember going into what I thought was a closet, and there was this Indian dude on the ground with no shoes on and he had a screwdriver and he was taking apart all these DVRs. He looked like he had been up all night or something. And I said, “What are you working on in here?” And he said, “I’m recording all broadcast TV.” And I was like, “O.K. Carry on.”
Marissa Mayer: I was there the day we did the first Street View experiments. It was a Saturday and we just wanted to blow off some steam. We rented an $8,000 camera from Wolf Camera that was considerably less when rented per day. We drove around in a little blue Volkswagen Bug with the camera on a tripod in the passenger seat. We just started driving around Palo Alto taking a photo every 15 seconds, and then, at the end of the day, we took photo-stitching software to see if we could stitch the pictures together.
Heather Cairns: Larry and Sergey were first and foremost, and probably still are, inventors. That was their true love.
Marissa Mayer: I hosted weekly brainstorming sessions because we wanted people to think big. One week I started the session with the space tether. We started brainstorming about building it out of carbon nanotubes, and could we use it to do pizza delivery to the moon?
Douglas Edwards: Sergey would just throw out these marketing ideas. He wanted to project our logo on the Moon. He wanted to take the entire marketing budget and use it to help Chechen refugees. He wanted to make Google-branded condoms that we would give out to high schools. There were a lot of ideas that were floated and most of them never became full-fledged projects. But if Larry and Sergey suggested something you pretty much had to take it at face value for a while.
Marissa Mayer: Some things we actually did go out and build—like driverless cars. We brainstormed that.
Biz Stone: It was just strange, it was really weird, but it was awesome, too.
Charlie Ayers: The whole climate of the company was a focus on growth, growth, growth.
Heather Cairns: I would say that by 2003, it’s a very different place than when we started. We’re like 2,000 people, and people were talking about going public.
Heather Cairns: Going public. Being rich. Going public. Going public. That was really on the forefront of so many people’s minds.
Charlie Ayers: At that point there were a lot of us who had been there forever, who pretty much would just come to hang out. They were waiting, not even working anymore. You were seeing that happen with a lot of people.
Ray Sidney: I got burnt out. I was not feeling very productive. I thought, You know what? I need to get away.
Charlie Ayers: A lot of the early-timers were looking at, like, How much does this island cost? There was a lot of distraction.
Ray Sidney: Originally I thought, You know what? I just need to take a month or two off, and then I’ll kind of get that fire back in my belly. And that never happened. I left in March of 2003.
Charlie Ayers: As the I.P.O. got closer, the level of distraction got greater and greater and greater. Their eyelids were too heavy with dollar signs.
John Battelle, founding editor of Wired, entrepreneur, author: With the benefit of hindsight, Google’s I.P.O. in 2004 was as important as the Netscape I.P.O. in 1995. Everyone got excited about the Internet in the late 90s, but the truth was a very small percentage of the world used it. Google went public after the dot-com crash and re-established the Web as a medium.
Douglas Edwards: After the I.P.O., it became more buttoned-up, more metrics driven—which was good for the company, probably. But it was not the culture that I was used to and had enjoyed when I was there.
Charlie Ayers: They’re like, “We’re publicly traded now.” So 2004 was not the best year at Google, morale-wise. They started sending more of us to Dale Carnegie classes.
Heather Cairns: Larry and Sergey used to hold their forks and knives in a fist, scooping. They used to scoop food into their mouths, which would be a couple of inches from the plate and I’d be like, I can’t even watch this. I can’t. I’m going to be sick. They had to be taught not to do that.
Charlie Ayers: There were a handful of us that would go to public-speaking classes, media-training classes, leadership classes.
Heather Cairns: Nobody has superbad, disgusting behavior anymore. It’s really depressing. The personality has been coached out of them—all of them.
This article has been adapted from Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom), published by Twelve.