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"but everybody and their brother had a search engine in those days. I asked, 'Where are you going with this? How will you make money?' And Sergey said, 'Well ..., we'll figure something out.' I asked, 'Do you already have a plan figured out and you're collecting smart people to make it happen?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's pretty much it.'" Very reassuring.
    I had worked for a startup in the eighties, joining a group of former auditors with an idea that would revolutionize health-care marketing. They set up shop in San Francisco next to a former garage that now housed a Chinese restaurant. The place was soaked in adrenaline and constantly shifting direction. Change, change, change. Charge ahead. No back. I left after three months, and a few weeks later the company disappeared. I learned that hyperactivity wasn't the same as productivity. Google, however, gave off a different vibe.
    A big part of that was the people I met.
    "Hi, I'm Jim," said the guy who came by to give me my laptop and set up my phone. "Jim Reese. I should have this done in a jiffy." Something about him reminded me of Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man:
the open and friendly attitude, the hair parted way over on one side, the whiff of geekiness I detected as he crawled under my desk, whipped out a screwdriver, and began adeptly fiddling with one of the jacks.
    I later learned that Google had hired Jim as a systems administrator (sysadmin) because the early engineers were all coders and not so good with hardware. It wasn't what Jim had been trained to do at Harvard, at Yale Medical School, or in his neurosurgery residency at Stanford, but somewhere along the line he had developed an interest in computer networking and had ended up on the phone with Urs Hölzle, Google's head of engineering. Recruiters from other companies had spent their interview time selling him on the jobs they were offering. Not Urs.
    "Urs said nothing about coming to the company," Jim recalls. "Every single question was like, 'Tell me how many bits there are in a netmask for a slash 28 network.' Then he started drilling down from there." That focus on the technology had convinced Jim to sign on.
    The day in June 1999 when Jim started as Google employee number eighteen, his orientation took less than a minute. "Here's your space over here," Larry directed him. "There are a bunch of parts over there. Make your own computer." It was the same for the next guy hired: Larry "Schwim" Schwimmer, who took responsibility for Google's mail and security systems.
    I stopped by the office Schwim shared with Jim so he could sign me up for a company email account. A large stuffed penguin, the mascot for the Linux operating system our engineers used instead of Windows, sat in a folding chair next to a model of the human skull left over from Jim's med school days. The room felt cramped, as most Google offices did, and was crowded with wires and RAM and computers in various states of assembly. Schwim peered from behind his monitor with the distracted look of someone whose mind was elsewhere—like John Malkovich in that movie where a puppeteer took command of his brain.
    "You're the first Doug," Schwim told me. "Do you want [email protected] ?" I did. I felt a strange tingle as I thought about the implication of that. The first Doug. Among certain sets in Silicon Valley, your email address indicates more about you than the car you drive or the clothes you wear. I liked the status doug@google conferred on me as an early adopter.
    I'd see a lot of "Jim and Schwim," as they came to be called. Their group, known as operations or ops, took charge of building and maintaining all the machines running Google. Larry had given Jim a list on his second day, in priority order, of the top one hundred things he wanted done. Number one was "to make sure we had enough capacity to run the site and if there are problems, solve them or find someone to solve them."
    "The first year I got nine done," Jim confessed with a hint of pride.