Charlie Ayers, Google’s first executive chef and, therefore, a member of an early executive team: I remember going in for an interview and Larry bounced on by on one of these big balls that have handles on them, like you buy at Toys “R” Us when you’re a kid. It was just a very unprofessional, uncorporation attitude. I have a pretty good understanding of doing things differently from the Grateful Dead—I’ve worked on and off with them over the years—but from my perspective, looking from the outside, it was an odd interview. I’d never had one like that. I left them thinking that these guys are crazy. They don’t need a chef!
Heather Cairns: I was very surprised that they hired this ex–Grateful Dead chef, since clearly everything that goes with that is coming with Charlie. Talk about a counterculture person!
Charlie Ayers: Larry’s dad was a big Deadhead; he used to run the Grateful Dead-hour talk show on the radio every Sunday night. Larry grew up in the Grateful Dead environment.
Larry Page: We do go out of our way to recruit people who are a little bit different.
Charlie Ayers: There was no under-my-thumb bullshit going on where you all had to dress and look and smell and act alike. Their unwritten tagline is like: You show up in a suit? You’re not getting hired! I remember people that they wanted showing up in suits and them saying, “Go home and change and be yourself and come back tomorrow.”
Heather Cairns: We said it was O.K. to bring pets to work one day a week. And what that did was encourage people to get lizards, cats, dogs—oh my God, everything was coming through the door! I was mortified because I know this much: if you have your puppy at work, you’re not working that much.
Douglas Edwards, Google employee #59: We would go up to Squaw Valley, C.A., and attendance was pretty much mandatory. That became the company thing.
Ray Sidney: The very first ski trip was in the first part of 1999. That was definitely a popular event over the years.
Charlie Ayers: On the ski trips in Squaw Valley, I would have these unsanctioned parties and finally the company was like, “All right, we’ll give Charlie what he wants.” And I created Charlie’s Den. I had live bands, D.J.s, and we bought truckloads of alcohol and a bunch of pot and made ganja goo balls. I remember people coming up to me and saying, “I’m hallucinating. What the fuck is in those?” . . . Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later. (A spokesperson for Google declined to comment.)
Heather Cairns: You kind of trusted Larry with his personal life. We always kind of worried that Sergey was going to date somebody in the company . . .
Charlie Ayers: Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.
Heather Cairns: And we didn’t have locks, so you can’t help it if you walk in on people if there’s no lock. Remember, we’re a bunch of twentysomethings except for me—ancient at 35, so there’s some hormones and they’re raging.
Charlie Ayers: H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.
Heather Cairns: Oh my God: this is a sexual harassment claim waiting to happen! That was my concern.
Charlie Ayers: When Sheryl Sandberg joined the company is when I saw a vast shift in everything in the company. People who came in wearing suits were actually being hired.
Heather Cairns: When Eric Schmidt joined, I thought, Well, now, we have a chance. This guy is serious. This guy is real. This guy is high-profile. And of course he had to be an engineer, too. Otherwise, Larry and Sergey wouldn’t have it.
Well thank god they fired James Damore and cleared up all the sexism problems in that company.
Just goes to show you it isn’t all millennials. Page and Brin are my generation [X], though their origins and upbringings weren’t exactly near the baseline.
They seem to have many of the millennial traits in embryo, although a young boomer’s insouciant attitude to sexual behavior. A combination befitting the transitional generation, I suppose.
I loved that militant assumption that wearing business attire is phony and that frat house attitude to meetings. Lucky they had talent, I guess.
Talent? No, outrageously good luck. Some of which they made, some of which was granted by arrogant and incompetent competitors, but most of which came from sheer grace of Dame Fortune. Watch what happens when Google can no longer rely on mere luck to survive.
Well, I am allowing that the ability to recognize and seize the opportunities provided by luck/fortune is itself a talent, and so is the ability to seize such an opportunity and extend its scope into bigger opportunity. indeed, those might be two separate talents, the latter even rarer than the former.
Sheer hucksterism is a talent, too.
Many of us are so lacking in all three of these areas that Fortune could come up and kick us in the gonads and we wouldn’t recognize it. We might double over, sure, but not also seize the chance being offered.
So some props are due to those who can and do, even if they bring literally nothing else to the table. If they do bring something else and seize the chance to apply it, then that’s worth even more, of course.
Or as Shakespeare’s Brutus would say,
“There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”