Their Menlo Park friend and former landlady, Susan Wojcicki, is now director of product management and a major player in charge of managing relationships with companies such as Yahoo that use Google’s search mechanism. The mother of two small children, she enjoys Google’s many excellent employee benefits, including three months of maternity leave paid at 75 percent of salary and two weeks of paid paternity leave. During the first week after the babies were born, free meals were delivered to her home. Larry and Sergey--as employees call them--replicated the culture of the company’s informal infancy, figuring that the better they handled workforce management, the better the business would be. There’s still an employee washer and dryer, and a shower. Candy and snacks continue to be staples.

    Google is now headquartered in more corporate-looking digs in neighboring Mountain View, in the hub of Silicon Valley. But Page and Brin, a native of Moscow, have retained their garage office values. The results are mind-boggling. In 2001, Google had about 200 employees. Last year, it added 500. As many as 20 contractors are required just to review the 1,000 résumés that arrive daily. The company may double in size this year, again.

    To make the operation work, Page and Brin are directly involved in human resources issues. Every Wednesday afternoon, for example, the duo meets with human resources director Stacy Sullivan and other executives to talk about recruiting concerns, and address questions such as: Are candidates having to go through too many interviews? Is the process taking too long for the candidate?

    The founders also come up with recruiting ideas--some off-the-wall. At a recent meeting, for example, Brin suggested skipping candidate interviews entirely and trying to hire people solely on the basis of their résumés. (The idea is still under consideration.) Throughout the week, hiring managers look for "fit," a process that has resulted in a 95 percent acceptance rate and about 4 percent turnover.

    At Google, formality and convention aren’t the corporate values. When a job applicant shows up for an interview, he could, for example, elect to sit in a chair or perhaps sink into a beanbag. The latter is what a Google kind of person would do. The company wants people who are flexible enough to adjust to big changes on the job. When a hiring manager listens to a candidate, she’s trying to see if the person is thinking more about the team or more about himself. Google wants employees who can play ideas off others. Sullivan and her 10-person human resources team keep in touch with more than 300 professors nationwide, making sure Google knows who their best students are.

    What’s fascinating about Google’s intense focus on workforce management is not that Page and Brin have bought into the idea that happy, high-performing employees will result in a good product. They have sold this idea; it is their passion. One employee says, off the record, "Larry and Sergey are sometimes more interested in the people here than the product." Last summer, when the company was looking for a receptionist, Brin interviewed finalists himself. Page, Brin, and Sullivan have made it their business to find out what employees at other companies don’t like about their benefits. Then, they don’t offer those things.

    At Google, 401(k) and health benefits begin as soon as an employee reports for work. New hires begin with three weeks’vacation during the first year. There are no sick days at Google; when you’re sick, you simply stay home. Two days a week, a physician is available on site. The pièce de résistance is this: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are free.

    After seeing a recent 60 Minutes TV segment on benefits-rich SAS Institute, Page and Brin went to Sullivan’s team and said, "We’ve got to add benefits." They’d like an expanded medical facility on site, as well as a day-care center, a preschool, and social workers.

It’s about creativity
    It’s not just the free tortellini in the cafeteria that causes top Ph.D. candidates to leave school and work for Google. Page and Brin want top performers to come to Google because making sense out of billions of Web addresses is compelling and challenging.

    Lucas Pereira, a software engineer, was four and a half years into a Stanford Ph.D. program in computer graphics when he went to work at Google in 2000. He put his studies on hold--probably forever. "In school you put a lot of work into getting the footnotes right, and how many people really, truly care?" he asks. "Here you launch a site feature and there are 50 news articles about it the next day." Pereira says that the people at the company are much like graduate students, which in fact they are. Dozens of Stanford alumni work at Google.

    Every Friday afternoon, the founders gather all employees into an open area for a TGIF meeting. Brin and Page talk about new product launches, advertising victories, and scuttlebutt about competitors. Schmidt and the company’s senior management also share financial data. Google’s sales, which include text-based ads at the top of search-results pages, brought the company to profitability in 2001. Hoover’s estimates that Google did about $100 million in sales in 2002.

    Google now has locations in France, Germany, Holland, Australia, Italy, and Japan. The founders are trying to duplicate as much of the company’s unique culture and benefits as possible as the company expands in size and geography. Wojcicki says that Google’s cultural trademarks are illustrations of its values. That’s why it provides 30 different kinds of cereal in the office and everchanging cubicle configurations. "It’s about creativity, enabling people to be creative about their jobs," she says. "It’s not a culture about standardization."