My dinner with Sergey

A couple of days after my first interview, I got another call. Could I come back to meet some more of the staff? I could and I did. I chatted with Scott Epstein, the interim VP of Sales who was phasing out after putting forth a plan to spend millions on an advertising campaign, an idea that didn't go over terribly well with Larry and Sergey. He wished me well. I met with Urs Hoelzle, Google's head of engineering and owner of Yoshka, a free-range wooly mammoth that Urs assured me was perfectly harmless, as long as I didn't lie down on the floor and act like a chew toy. I met with Omid, the newly hired head of sales, who was so genuine I felt safe confiding in him that I was not a big fan of AOL, only to discover that he was a Netscapee who had been at the company when it was acquired by AOL.

And then Cindy brought me back to the conference room in which I'd begun to wait for Sergey Brin. I wasn't nervous. I knew that Sergey was about the age of my favorite t-shirt and was Russian by birth. I had been to Russia. I knew Russian. Russians were friends of mine. I understood their dark humor, their cynical views and their sarcastic ways. It was one of those rare times when I felt a sense of confidence going into an interview that it was all going to work out just fine. I could handle this guy. If I ended up working with him, I could probably mentor him on how to run a successful business as we toasted success with Siberian vodka.

When Sergey showed up, my initial impression was even more reassuring. He was wearing gym shorts, a tee shirt and inline skates. He had obviously been playing hard. I'd known better than to wear a tie, but he took office casual to a new level. I sat back and began toying with one of the rubber balls, feeling so relaxed that I accidentally removed its stopper, causing half the air inside to rush out with a hiss. Sergey seemed to find that amusing. He quickly pored over my resume, and began peppering me with questions. "What kind of marketing did you do that was most effective?" "What metrics did you use to measure it?" "What types of viral marketing did you do?" "What was your GPA?" I was doing fine until that last one. I just looked at him.

"My GPA?" I asked. I hadn't thought about my GPA since the day they handed me my diploma in 1981. And given that Brown allowed me to take as many classes as I wanted with a pass/fail option, I'm not sure I ever knew what my GPA was. I laughed it off, thinking he was joking, but even after I had an offer on the table, the HR people kept pestering me for a college transcript and my S.A.T. scores. It was a classic Google moment. Your S.A.T. score was the measure of your intellectual capability; your GPA represented the numerical summary of your ability to execute on that potential. Your value to Google could be plotted using those two data points.

Sergey's desire to reduce every decision to an equation would cause me a fair amount of frustration in the years to come. While it forced a discipline on me that was likely lacking in my career up to that point, it also went against my deeply-held conviction that some things are not expressible simply by deriving the correct algorithm. A lot of engineers at Google would dispute that with religious conviction, though they might admit that deriving the correct algorithm would be "non-trivial."

But that was not Sergey's hard question. He saved that for last.