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mixture of liberation and anxiety since the day I stuck my diploma in a drawer and first opened a help-wanted section.
    I spent the next eight hours settling in, collecting Google's standard-issue mechanical pencils and quadrille-ruled lab books from a metal file cabinet and arranging my stapler and tape dispenser and docking station and inbox until my desk was exactly balanced. I was ready, but not sure for what.
    I took a personal inventory. Two decades in marketing had taught me many practical things, from how to build consensus across divisions to how to write a CYA memo when I wanted to color outside the lines. I viewed that experience as an important asset but was beginning to suspect that within the walls of the Googleplex, * it might be valued differently. I had wanted to live the Silicon Valley startup life, with its complete lack of longstanding rules. Now, poised on the precipice of realizing that dream, I asked myself, "My God. What have I done?"

Chapter 2
     

In the Beginning
    H EY, WANT TO see something cool?" Jay asked me, standing in the micro-kitchen eating from a cup of yogurt, barefoot and sporting pajama pants, a well-loved sweatshirt, and a graying ponytail.
    "Sure," I said, though I couldn't imagine anything cooler than the kitchen itself. One entire wall was lined with bins of granola and cereal. Other bins were filled with Gummi Bears, peach gels, M&Ms, * nutrition bars, and instant oatmeal. Caffeinated and carbonated beverages chilled inside illuminated Google-branded coolers. Boxes of soy milk and Rice Dream stood stacked in the corners. A toaster and a new white breadmaker gleamed on the counter next to the sink.
    I'd been at work almost a week and was getting the lay of the land. Jay and Radhika, both engineers and parents, were the only ones who arrived at the office as early as I did, perhaps because we all had kids to drop off on the way. Jay was around my age and a veteran of the Valley who had already been at Google more than a month, making him a valuable source of knowledge about the corporate culture.
    I followed him toward a row of glass offices in the engineering zone. He pointed to a large K'nex roller coaster stretching the length of two desks set end to end. "I built this one day when I needed a break from coding," he said as he turned it on. We watched as a little gray-wheeled cart climbed to the summit and then raced downhill into a loop de loop.
    "That
is
pretty cool," I gushed, but not about the roller coaster. I'd already noticed that Jay worked what, to me, were reasonable hours and left in the late afternoon to pick up his kids. Despite the prevailing conception of startups as Silicon Valley's sweatshops, Jay's kick-back attitude convinced me I'd be able to work at Google, help raise our children, and even find time for my own personal development. Pretty cool indeed.
    It was a happy fantasy.
    My life balance was about to get knocked on its inner ear. In less than a year I would be working sixteen-hour days and Jay would depart Google to pursue personal goals that were at odds with those of the company.
    What were Google's goals in late 1999? Hell if I knew. We were a search engine. What did search engines do? They searched. I assumed that we wanted to be the best damn search engine on the planet. Even better than AltaVista. It seemed unlikely we'd ever be a giant like Yahoo, given their head start, but maybe someday we'd be big enough to make Inktomi share the market for supplying portals with technology. There were no mouse pads imprinted with our mission statement or motivational posters on the walls urging us to surpass our sales targets as there had been at the
Merc.
If Googlers, or anyone else, had a clear vision of the company's future, they kept it hidden. And not just from me.
    "I had lunch with Sergey and another engineer and it was clear they had a search engine," said engineer Ed Karrels, who in 1999 was trying to decide if he should leave SGI for a job at Google,