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BAIT & SWITCH
Dinner with the mind behind the mind of God
A meeting with Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, at the Russian Tea Room in San Francisco.
By Jason Pontin
July 16, 2002

Meeting Sergey Brin, the cofounder and president of technology at Google, is disorienting--a little like encountering one of those Japanese soldiers who were flushed from South Sea islands as recently as the '70s. But whereas finding Captain Nakahira must have been a fairly negative experience for everyone concerned, having dinner with Sergey Brin--if you like technology and startups--is uninterruptedly sunny. For Mr. Brin, it's still the late '90s.

Google has much of the heat that Netscape once possessed. Google's Web site is the most visited search engine in the world, and the company even looks like an old-fashioned dot-com: it has a Silicon Valley elder statesman for its CEO (Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Novell), but its founders are 20-something computer scientists. The company has money in the bank from such '90s illuminati as John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital. Inside the Googleplex, the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, there is a professional chef (who once worked for the Grateful Dead) preparing dinners and lunches of hamachi and lobster. There are two staff masseurs, a staff physician, and even lava lamps.

What makes this all the more extraordinary is that Google's success is entirely the result of old-fashioned technological excellence. We wanted to meet the man most associated with Google's technology and suggested that Mr. Brin join us for dinner at Katia's Russian Tea Room, a restaurant in San Francisco's foggy Richmond district. Our choice was meant to be mildly humorous: Mr. Brin is Russian by birth.

The Red Herring genre we call "Bait & Switch" demands that we take gullible entrepreneurs and technologists to dinner and write up their drunken indiscretions. Our subjects may talk about anything but their companies. In the case of Mr. Brin, however, our plans collided with three immutable facts. The first was the titanic tolerance of Russians for alcohol: as the bottles of wine piled up, Mr. Brin stayed resolutely "on message." The second was the live music: through much of the evening, Sasha, a man wearing an Autodesk shirt and a black beret, sat by the door playing Abba covers on a wheezing accordion. Finally, Mr. Brin truly is a geek in the heroic '90s style. Charming, smart, urbane, he nevertheless doesn't really want to talk about much else besides his company and search technology.

As Sasha swayed to "Dancing Queen" on his accordion, Mr. Brin ordered dinner for us: borscht, piroshki, stuffed cabbage, pilmeni, and blinis. Questions about his childhood were answered in a desultory fashion. His father, a Russian mathematician, and his mother, some kind of rocket scientist, came to America to teach because "the Jews were the only people the Russians didn't want." The Brin family settled at the University of Maryland when Sergey was a child. In due course, Mr. Brin studied mathematics there, graduated early, and went to work toward a doctorate in computer science at Stanford University. It was there that he met his cofounder, Larry Page, and began the research that would lead to the copublication of the paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," and (in 1998) to the founding of Google.

Sasha was playing Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly." (Remember, this is on the accordion.) Swallowing his cabbage, Mr. Brin declared the food every bit as good as Mother Brin's. Mr. Brin wanted to talk about Google because he was justifiably proud: he explained that, despite all the superficial similarities of Google to Netscape or Yahoo, the company had learned from the mistake of the earlier generation of Internet companies. "And I don't mean merely that Eric [Schmidt] insists that we be conservative financially and turn a profit . . . Netscape just added too much. It became a media company. All we do is search. Have you noticed that our Web site has actually gotten simpler?" he asked. Google was, Mr. Brin said, an anachronism--a Silicon Valley firm still dedicated to research and development. "Of our 260 employees, more than 50 have Ph.D.s. We have the largest research staff dedicated to search in the world," he boasted.

Were Apple and Microsoft in any way similar? we asked. Both, Mr. Brin said, concentrated on one thing, did it well, and had retained their founders' interest and management. Apple did design ("Steve Jobs is crazy," Mr. Brin commented, apparently with approval). Microsoft, he explained interestingly, did not do software development so much as the management and documentation of software development over several generations. This was a "nontrivial problem." Why? "Because developers document nothing!" Mr. Brin shouted with genuine vexation. Developers hate to manage people and resist being managed: a software company that survived several generations was therefore a rarity.

As we became drunker, Mr. Brin indulged a few questions not related to Google. What did he think about the Middle East? Not interested: "They'll keep on at each other until they get tired," he said of the antagonists. One of us was about to travel in Russia. Did he have any advice? "Bring a bodyguard." Russia could now produce nearly as much oil and natural gas as the entire Persian Gulf. What were the geopolitical implications? "Russia is Nigeria with snow. Do you really want a bunch of criminal cowboys controlling the world's energy supply?"

But in the end, the conversation returned to search. What would a perfect search engine look like? we asked. "It would be the mind of God. Larry [Page] says it would know exactly what you want and give you back exactly what you need."

Write to Jason Pontin.

   
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