Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

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Becoming a Founder
Just as Larry and Sergey laid the foundation for how Google
treats its people, you can lay the foundation for how your
team works and lives
Every great tale starts with an origin story.
The infants Romulus and Remus, abandoned beside the Tiber River, are
nursed by a she-wolf, fed by a woodpecker, and then raised by kindly
shepherds. As a young man, Romulus goes on to found the city of Rome.
Baby Kal-El rockets to earth as his home planet Krypton explodes behind
him, landing in Smallville, Kansas, to be raised by the kindly Martha and
Jonathan Kent. Moving to Metropolis, he takes on the mantle of Superman.
Thomas Alva Edison opens a lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. He
brings together an American mathematician, an English machinist, a German
glassblower, and a Swiss clockmaker who develop an incandescent lightbulb
that burns for more than thirteen hours, laying the foundation for the Edison
General Electric Company.
Oprah Winfrey, born of an impoverished teenage mother, abused as a
child, and shuttled from home to home, goes on to become an honors student,
the youngest and first black news anchor at WLAC-TV in Nashville, and one
of the most successful communicators and inspirational businesspeople in the
world.
Vastly different tales, yet all teasingly similar. The mythologist Joseph
Campbell argued that there are just a few archetypal stories that underpin
most myths around the world. We are called to an adventure, face a series of
trials, become wiser, and then find some manner of mastery or peace. We
humans live through narrative, viewing history through a lens of stories that
we tell ourselves. No wonder that we find common threads in the tapestries of
one another’s lives.
Google has an origin story too. Most think it began when Larry Page and
Sergey Brin, Google’s founders, met during a campus tour for new students at

Stanford University. But it starts much earlier than that.
Larry’s views were shaped by his family history: “My grandfather was an
autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the
company that he would carry to work. It’s a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead
on the head.”
He explained, “The workers made them during the sit-down
strikes to protect themselves.”
Sergey’s family had defected from the Soviet Union in 1979, seeking
freedom and a respite from the anti-Semitism of the Communist regime. “My
rebelliousness, I think, came out of being born in Moscow,” explained Sergey.
“I’d say this is something that followed me into adulthood.”
Larry’s and Sergey’s ideas about how work could be were also informed
by their early experiences at school. As Sergey has commented: “I do think I
benefited from the Montessori education, which in some ways gives the
students a lot more freedoms to do things at their own pace.” Marissa Mayer,
at the time a Google vice president of product management and now CEO of
Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “You can’t understand
Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori
kids.”
This teaching environment is tailored to a child’s learning needs and
personality, and children are encouraged to question everything, act of their
own volition, and create.
In March 1995, a twenty-two-year-old Larry Page was visiting Stanford
University in Palo Alto, California. He was finishing his undergraduate
degree at the University of Michigan and considering entering Stanford’s PhD
program in computer science. Sergey, twenty-one years old, had graduated
from the University of Maryland two years earlier and was already enrolled
in the PhD program. He was volunteering as a tour guide for prospective
students. And of course, Larry was assigned to Sergey’s tour group.
They quickly developed a friendly banter, and a few months later Larry
showed up as a new student. Larry was fascinated with the World Wide Web,
and particularly the way Web pages connected to one another.
The Web in 1996 was a chaotic mess. In simplest terms, search engines
wanted to show the most relevant, useful Web pages, but ranked them mainly
by comparing the text on a Web page to the search query that was typed. That
left a loophole. The owner of a Web page could boost his rankings on search
engines with tricks like hiding popular search terms in invisible text on the
page. If you wanted people to come to your pet food site, you could write “pet
food” in blue text on a blue background a hundred times, and your search
ranking would improve. Another trick was to repeat words again and again in
the source code that generated your page but was invisible to a human reader.

Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock