Introduction

Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a private companyon 4 September 1998. The IPO took place on 19 August 2004, raising USD1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy, and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google, the latter resulting in being identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine’s #1 Best Place to Work. The unofficial company slogan is “Don’t be evil”, although criticism includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, censorship and discontinuation of services. Google earns revenue through various models of advertisements.

The Visit

Although we did not have the privilege to be shown around by the Google founders, we were fortunately shown around the Googleplex by Chris Henry, an intern from NUS. Though we could not learn much about the start up process, we learnt much about Google’s working culture which was fun and interesting. He presented to us the “famous” 20% projects. Each week, Google employees are given 20% of their time to work on something - anything they want to work on. And some good projects end up being applications of Google. This is a great way to harness every employees creativity and instill some sort of ownership in them. We were also particularly fascinated by the “food within 50m” rule. Pantrys were a common sight as we toured around the company, each of them well stocked with munchies. Given the food is not as easily found in the area, the pantries really help the employees to save time. Chris also showed us photos of their company outings -skiiing outings, disneyland outings etc. There were so many employees who turned up, they all look like ants in the picture. In a nutshell, the working culture looks fantastic. Through Chris’ internship experience, we learnt about the intern’s perspective etc.

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