Free The Google Guys by Richard L. Brandt Page A

large number of employees all of a sudden becomes a huge number. Look at bottled water per employee. Multiply it by twenty thousand people, and all of a sudden you’re aghast. We just spent a million dollars in one year on water.” Regarding the daycare subsidies, he notes that “the benefit went to a relatively small number of people, but we were paying more per child than a full-time nanny would cost . . . . The numbers just didn’t work out very well. It’s healthy for us to look at each of those things. I absolutely think they have a right to look at our expenditures.”
    This became more critical when the recession that hit the world in 2008 hit Google as well. For the first time, the company started laying off employees. It started with several thousand contract workers, temporary employees who do not work directly for Google. But in January 2009, acknowledging that even Google had to start watching the bottom line, the company announced that it would slow its frenetic hiring pace and was eliminating jobs for one hundred of its recruiters. It also closed several far-flung offices, although it’s offering those employees jobs elsewhere at Google.
    The idea that Google is becoming “just another company” is a bit of an exaggeration. But, as is inevitable for any company that becomes as big and powerful as Google, the sharp edges are becoming worn as ideals bow to practicality, with the executives conceding to some difficult choices. The company is becoming both tougher and softer. The same is true for Larry and Sergey themselves.

Chapter 4
    Larry and Sergey’s Corporate Vision
    He ne’er is crown’d
With immortality, who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead.
    â€”John Keats
    Â 
    I n January 1999, a reporter knocked on the door of a Menlo Park apartment that had a handwritten sign reading “Google World Headquarters” hanging by the doorbell. Larry and Sergey had gotten their first investment from Andy Bechtolsheim just five months earlier, and the seven-person start-up was still working out of the apartment’s kitchen and garage. (“Starting Monday, we’ll have 6 full-time employees. This week we have 5, last week we had 4. I think it’s going to keep growing at that pace for a while,” said Sergey.) 1 The reporter, Karsten Lemm, wasn’t looking to profile an incredibly promising start-up. Larry and Sergey were just two of several entrepreneurs he was interviewing as part of a story for the German news magazine Stern about Silicon Valley and the start-ups that kept springing up like poppies in the spring. Larry Page’s business card then said he was CEO of “Google!”—that exclamation mark a sign that the pair aspired to be as important as “Yahoo!”
    Larry and Sergey talked with Lemm about the start of the company, getting funding, and why they weren’t late to the search engine game, with Sergey adding a telling comment: “There’s one more important thing, and that’s to bring what we’ve done to the world. That’s very exciting, too, of course. And we think this does have a potential to really change things forever.”
    Entrepreneurship is a crime of passion. It requires motive, means, and opportunity. The opportunity that was handed to Google was appreciated by nobody but its founders until it was too late to imitate. The means and the motive are pure Larry and Sergey. Google is one of those companies that, like Apple and Microsoft, relies so heavily on the founders that, without them, it just wouldn’t have the dynamism that makes it great.
    Theoretically, any of a half dozen companies in business in 1999 could have been where Google is today. Yahoo was the leading Internet company and the main source of finding information on the Web (although it was not a search engine at the time). Microsoft had reached into its very deep pockets to take over the Web browser business and