Shriram offered to make an initial investment and help them incorporate. He also helped them work out a licensing agreement with Stanford so the university would benefit if their two graduate students were successful. On September 7, 1998, the day Google officially incorporated, he wrote out a check for just over $250,000, one of four of this size the founders received. The first was signed by Sun Microsystems cofounder and then Cisco executive Andy Bechtolsheim, who wrote his in August. He had been introduced to Page and Brin by Stanford computer science professor David Cheriton, who became the third initial investor. At the time, Shriram was in the process of selling Junglee to Amazon.com, and in August would start spending most of the week in Seattle as vice president, business development, at Amazon. This link produced the secret fourth investor, Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos. One day Bezos asked Shriram what was interesting in the Valley. When he touted Google, Bezos asked Shriram to arrange a meeting with Larry and Sergey. “I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos recalled; he wrote his check in November. His enthusiasm was ignited less by the idea, and “certainly not by the business plan. There was no business plan. They had a vision. It was a customer-focused point of view.” In September, Shriram was asked to join Page and Brin as one of three Google directors, a seat he continues to hold on a board that now consists of ten members.

For $1,700 a month, the just-formed company sublet new office space: the two-car Menlo Park garage and two downstairs spare rooms of an 1,800-square-foot house in Menlo Park. The owners were friends: Susan Wojcicki, an engineer at Intel, and her husband Dennis Troper, a product manager at a tech company. The newly constituted Google had found its way to them because Sergey had dated Susan’s roommate at Stanford Business School. The house was not located in the upscale sections of Menlo Park, near the Sand Hill Road offices made famous by the venture capitalists whose offices are there, or in nearby Atherton, where many of these venture capitalists live and in 2008 an acre of land could sell for $3 million. Rather, it was on a dreary flag lot at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue.

A concrete driveway led up to the garage, where a whiteboard had been attached with the legend, “Google Worldwide Headquarters.” Inside were three tables, three chairs, a dirty turquoise shag carpet, a tiny refrigerator, an old washer and dryer, and a Ping-Pong table that was kept folded because there wasn’t space to leave it open. They kept the garage door open for ventilation, and used a bathroom on the first floor of the house. Their desks were old pine doors that straddled sawhorses. On Monday mornings, Shriram met with Page and Brin in the cramped bedroom they used as an office, before flying to Amazon for the week. Days, nights, and weekends, Page and Brin and Silverstein lived and worked there, often leaving well after midnight in Silverstein’s ancient Porsche. “He’d start it and it would backfire five times-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat,” Brin said. “It sounded like a machine gun going off. We started pushing his car out onto the street before we’d start it.”

Although it was still in beta testing in the early fall of 1998, Google was getting ten thousand search queries daily. “I was really getting excited about Google,” said Shriram. The founders were getting excited too. “Larry said, ‘We’ll be at the doorstep of information,’” Susan Wojcicki recalled. Brin told her the company “was going to be worth billions of dollars.” That was also what they told visitors from search and portal companies who came to Wojcicki’s living room to discuss the possibility of acquiring Google. Even though the founders had no interest in selling, Wojcicki recalls that they’d propose an outrageous price, knowing it would deflect suitors. They also used the house for their first press interview, with a correspondent from the German magazine Stern, in which they displayed a combination of grandiosity and zeal. Search really “does have a potential to really change things forever,” Brin said. It can “play a really important role in people’s lives, determining what information they get to look at,” said Page, adding, “and that’s an important thing to do for the world.” Although Google had scant income, Page and Brin believed that if they built Google, people would come.

(1999-2000)

In early 1999, Google didn’t look like a company that would one day menace Microsoft. Aside from the one million dollars received from its four initial investors, and small amounts collected in the past half year from a handful of other angel investors like Ron Conway, Brin and Page had just a few sources of income: a twenty-thousand-dollar-per-month contract to provide specialized search results to Red Hat, a North Carolina consulting firm that advised companies using Linux and other open-source software, and the licensing of its search to several Web sites. Google had indexed only about 10 percent of the Web, and relied on a relatively primitive computer system to process search traffic that would explode from ten thousand to as many as five hundred thousand daily, each of which took three to four seconds to fetch results. To grow, Page and Brin knew their search engine had to “scale”: it had to crawl the entire Web, which would require vast computing power.

The first priority was recruiting engineers. By the end of 1998, a total of six Google employees were crammed into the garage and two small bedrooms. They’d need 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.