Free Googled by Ken Auletta Page A

more room if they were going to expand. So in early 1999 they relocated to a five-thousand-square-foot second-floor space over a bicycle store in downtown Palo Alto, where they balanced more pine doors on sawhorses to make desks and began hiring engineers to fill them. The result was “a graduate-student Disneyland,” Michael Specter wrote in The New Yorker in 2000, stocked with hockey sticks, Rollerblades, granola, PowerBars, “urns of coffee, and coolers of fruit juice to drive anybody through to 4 A.M.—which is not an unusual time to find people in the office.” Even then massages were part of the Google culture; there was a sign advertising that the service was available in the conference room—when the room was not being used for work. A green Ping-Pong table served as their conference table, and that was where, in April 1999, they interviewed Marissa Mayer, then completing a computer science degree from Stanford. It was the peak of the Internet bubble, and the cream of graduating engineers like Mayer had their pick of jobs. Mayer is a brilliant engineer and a proud computer nerd, but with her porcelain skin and lustrous blond hair she seems far from the stereotype—until one hears her jarring high-pitched giggle and tries to follow her words, which gush so rapidly that they collide. Brin, aware of her interest in using math to solve puzzles like how to make a Web site user-friendly, quizzed her for more than an hour. “Larry said nothing the entire time. At the end of the interview I asked, ‘Do you speak?’”
    She fit right in, and was invited back the next day to be interviewed separately by three engineers, who put her through the equivalent of a Ph.D. oral exam. Before making her an offer, Brin posed to his colleagues what has become known around Google as the airplane test. How would you feel, he asked, if you were stuck next to this person on a plane for several hours? Any candidate who failed this test was unlikely to be a good collaborator or team member. Mayer passed the test and became one of Google’s first twenty employees. (Because she was hired before completing school, Mayer is only certain she was between the fifteenth and twentieth employee.) Like all new employees, she was granted stock options that would one day make her wealthy, in her case enough to own a five-million-dollar penthouse apartment at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, filled with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein paintings, and a large, three-level Cape Cod house in Palo Alto.
    Google now had a team of engineers but no idea how to attract new investors. Ram Shriram recalled telling Brin, “We need a business plan,” to which Brin replied, “What’s a business plan?” Weeks earlier, Salar Kamangar, a biology major at Stanford who was taking a fifth year to study economics, had volunteered to work for free. With Shriram as a tutor, he was drafted to draw up the business plan. Kamangar, employee number 8, prepared, he said, “a binder on what other companies were doing in search and what was different about Google.” Page and Brin were pleased, and asked him to develop a PowerPoint presentation to show potential investors that Shriram and Bechtolsheim were introducing them to. The founders also asked Kamangar to attend these meetings, but first needed to give him a title. They decided, he said, on “senior strategist.” In their first business plan, Google had a sketchy idea that they’d make money by charging companies for advanced search results and by getting digital advertising companies like DoubleClick to sell online ads of some kind. The revenue plan wasn’t very impressive, but the search engine was. Users were multiplying. Secrecy was the watchword. While Google search was still small, he knew it was much larger than competitors anticipated: “We were in stealth mode,” Kamangar said. “If first Yahoo and then Microsoft knew that our number of searches was so much larger, they would be more