Google now had a team of engineers but no idea how to attract new investors. Ram Shriram recalled telling Brin, “We need a business plan,” to which Brin replied, “What’s a business plan?” Weeks earlier, Salar Kamangar, a biology major at Stanford who was taking a fifth year to study economics, had volunteered to work for free. With Shriram as a tutor, he was drafted to draw up the business plan. Kamangar, employee number 8, prepared, he said, “a binder on what other companies were doing in search and what was different about Google.” Page and Brin were pleased, and asked him to develop a PowerPoint presentation to show potential investors that Shriram and Bechtolsheim were introducing them to. The founders also asked Kamangar to attend these meetings, but first needed to give him a title. They decided, he said, on “senior strategist.” In their first business plan, Google had a sketchy idea that they’d make money by charging companies for advanced search results and by getting digital advertising companies like DoubleClick to sell online ads of some kind. The revenue plan wasn’t very impressive, but the search engine was. Users were multiplying. Secrecy was the watchword. While Google search was still small, he knew it was much larger than competitors anticipated: “We were in stealth mode,” Kamangar said. “If first Yahoo and then Microsoft knew that our number of searches was so much larger, they would be more aggressive.” Repeatedly, Page explained his mania for secrecy by invoking the example of Tesla.

Google had to sell the venture capitalists (VCs), but they also had to build a sales force to secure revenues, and for this task they required an experienced senior strategist and salesman. Netscape had just been acquired by AOL, and Shriram knew that Omid Kordestani, the Iranian-born vice president of business development at Netscape, was ready to move on. He orchestrated a meeting between Kordestani and the founders. On paper, Kordestani was a perfect fit for vice president of sales and business development. He held an MBA from Stanford’s business school, an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, and the natural enthusiasm and agreeable personality of a salesman. But first he had to endure a free-for-all Ping-Pong table grilling by the founders and the engineers. Brin opened the interrogation by saying, “I’ve never interviewed a business person before.” From that inauspicious beginning, Kordestani remembers, “They drilled me for five hours.” At the end, no job offer was tendered. The founders had an aversion to business executives, stereotyping them as bureaucrats, not entrepreneurs, and they wanted reference checks. They asked the angel investor who wrote their first check, Andy Bechtolsheim, to make some calls.

“It was a very thoughtful process,” Kordestani said, perhaps euphemistically; the eventual job offer was followed by two weekends of intense negotiations in February 1999 with the founders and then with David Drummond, Google’s outside counsel at the powerhouse Valley firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich amp; Rosati. (That the hiring process was so laborious would provide good preparation for Drummond; he himself would undergo a milder version of it in 2002, when he was hired as Google’s chief legal officer and vice president of corporate development.) Drummond remembers how in the early days of Google, Page and Brin would visit Wilson Sonsini’s offices and minutely inspect every legal document, asking him to explain each detail. Kordestani was finally hired, and received a hefty 2 percent of the phantom stock, more than any Google employee aside from the founders and Eric Schmidt, who joined in 2001; when Google’s stock soared, Kordestani was a paper billionaire.

The hiring process at Google in some ways paralleled the algorithmic approach to search. Although the founders applied the airplane test, that criteria was less important than the premium they placed on SAT scores and on grades and degrees from the best colleges. Real-world experience counted less than objective measurements. The thought that an entire human being could be judged by objective criteria was preposterous. It was a reminder of the tunnel vision Brin and Page-like so many young entrepreneurs-brought to their work. One reason they succeed is that they refuse to be diverted from their goal. But aside from the business books Page read before he started Google, he and Brin were relatively narrow in scope, without a 360-degree view of the world.

The hiring process did have its light moments. David Krane was working in public relations at a software company when he heard about Google. He was taken with the quirky sensibility he found when he clicked on the “About Google” button on their Web site. The son of a nuclear physicist, Krane once harbored hopes of becoming a musician. He was enamored of technology and was a rarity among PR people in that he could explain the difference between PQA (palm query application software, which allowed Web material to be seen on a handheld device) and HTML (hypertext markup language, the dominant Web language). A friend passed his ré sume to Google’s then vice president of corporate communications, Cindy McCaffrey, who was hired in July 1999 as employee number 26. She interviewed him, as did countless other executives over the next four and a half months. Finally, separate interviews were arranged with Page and Brin, both of whom found public relations and marketing a form of huckster-ism. It was no surprise that the first question Brin asked was, “Explain something technical to me? Topic of your choice.”

Ideas rushed to Krane’s brain, and he made a surprising choice. He explained how to make a reed for a clarinet, how to file and test and tweak it so the musical tone was clear and warm.

Brin listened, then quickly moved on to his second question: “Have you ever heard of Slashdot?”

Slashdot was a technology news site that encouraged user-generated comments, a pioneer of what came to be known as blogging. Krane smiled and pulled from his pocket a geeky badge of honor: a Palm 7, which permitted a wireless Internet connection to one of his favorite sites, Slashdot.com. “I thought,” said Krane, “I had aced the interview!”

Brin shook hands and left, and Page entered. “He greeted me in a very reserved way. He asked me the equivalent of a tell-me-about-yourself ice-breaker question.” Krane waltzed through his life, his interests, his passion for Google. “I wasn’t getting any kind of signal back from Larry. It was like talking to a stone wall.” He thought, “I’m sinking!”

Desperate, he began to talk about music, and his musical training. He completed maybe three sentences when Page excitedly interrupted, “That’s where I know you!”

Krane was mystified.

“That’s where I know you! I was at Interlochen too, that same summer! And I also played saxophone!” They swapped memories of the three months at Interlochen Arts Camp. “We figured out that we sat next to each other. Larry was in my left ear in the same jazz band. I played tenor sax and he played alto sax. We were both joined by acne, big glasses, and blue corduroy pants and light blue polyester short-sleeved shirts with a big butterfly collar, the Interlochen uniform.” Days later, Krane was hired on as employee number 84. Today he is Google’s director of global communications and public affairs.

As the business took shape, the founders thought more and more about aesthetics. They wanted a home page that was both playful and uncluttered, so they hired a Stanford design teacher named Ruth Kedar. Her instructions, she recalled, were clear: “Google wanted to create a unique logo that would clearly differentiate them from the other search players at the time… These other players were commercial portals first, and search engines second. Google wanted to convey that it was a search provider first and foremost… Google as a brand should repudiate all things corporate, conventional or complacent.” The design was meant “to look almost non-designed, the reading effortless. The colors evoke memories of child play.”