company to generate one hundred billion dollars in revenues. It irritated media executives to hear Schmidt say, “We are in the advertising business,” yet hear Google employees constantly say they were on a quest to bring information to the masses, as if they toiled for a nonprofit that awarded no bonuses.
Marc Andreessen, thirty-eight, who transformed the Internet into a mass medium by helping invent what became the Netscape browser when he was a student and who is today a successful Internet entrepreneur seeking to build his third billion-dollar-plus company, is suspicious of Google’s intentions: “Their game plan is to do everything. Google is Andy Kaufman. The whole thing with Andy Kaufman is you could never tell when he was joking. Google comes out with a straight face and said, ‘We’re just going to be a search engine. We’re not going to be doing any of this other stuff”—competing with advertising agencies, with telephone companies by getting into the cell phone business, with Hollywood, with publishers, with newspapers. “But I am quite sure they’re joking.”
THERE IS A DISCONNECT between the way Google is often perceived and the way it perceives itself. “I sometimes feel like I live on another planet and speak a different language from traditional media companies,” Eric Schmidt said. And in a sense, Google does live on a separate planet. When it moved to its first Mountain View campus in August 1999, the move reflected the determination of its two young founders to keep employees focused inward. The current Googleplex in Mountain View is a collection of two-and three-story buildings with outdoor tables and park benches shaded by trees, a vegetable garden, and walkways pulsing with people and bicycles. Employees enjoy free meals and luxurious snacks (at a cost to Google of about seventy million dollars per year), and are offered bicycles to travel between buildings containing massage rooms and gyms staffed with trainers. Employees eat at large cafeteria tables, take breaks in lounges with pool tables and espresso machines. No need to leave campus for a car wash or oil change; they’re available on Thursdays. Also available are barbers, dry cleaners, day care, dog care, dentists, and five physicians to dispense free physicals and medical care. Comfortable, Wi-Fi-equipped, biodiesel commuter buses transport employees to and from campus from as far away as San Francisco, and they run from early morning to late at night. No need to buy laptop computers; employees choose their own for free. Maternity leave consists of five months off at full salary, and new dads can take seven weeks off at full pay.
Most employees are alloted a day a week, or 20 percent of their time, to work on projects they feel passionate about. This has produced more than a few of Google’s technological breakthroughs. Just as important, it conveys a sense of freedom. “It’s a way of assuring people that they are scientists and artists,” said Indian-born engineer Krishna Bharat, who used his 20 percent time to invent Google News. It’s also a way to encourage engineers to push the envelope, to assume that their mission is to disrupt traditional ways of doing things.
There is at Google a utopian spirit not unlike that found at Burning Man, the annual anarchic-animistic retreat in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert that culminates in the burning in effigy of a giant wood and desert brush “man.” It does not go unnoticed by their friends that Brin and Page have been regular attendees at this weeklong retreat in August, whose Woodstock-like spirit is captured in Burning Man’s ten stated principles, which include a devotion “to acts of gift giving”; creating “social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising”; and “a radically participatory ethic” that can lead to “transformative change.” “Google is a cross between a start-up and graduate school,” said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, who joined the company in 2001 and wears bright Hawaiian shirts and sneakers with laces left untied. “Formal rules don’t matter. There’s still a loose feel. The disadvantage of being a start-up is the fear that you will run out of money. There is stress. Google is more like graduate school in that you don’t have that stress. You expect one day that the guys in suits will take over. That hasn’t happened.” The engineers remain in charge. Google aims to be nonhierarchical. Stacy Savides Sullivan, who joined the company in December 1999 and said she was its fiftieth employee, is Google’s chief cultural officer. She described the culture