Okay, it’s 1:06am, and I’m up reading Xooglers, a blog written by and for ex-Google employees. It is, in two words, absorbing reading, an unholy byte-sized cross between Rivethead and The Soul of a New Machine:
It became a running joke at TGIF after a while. Bart from Ad Ops or Paul or Schwim from engineering would stand up during the Q & A session and ask where we were in the CEO search process. Sergey would smile and say we were “making progress.” Sometimes he’d make a dismissive remark about a candidate they had interviewed because he lacked adequate technology chops or indicate that another seemed “interesting” because he had taken them helicopter skiing.In early 2001, Eric Schmidt was brought on board as CEO to great acclaim, not necessarily because people could see from the start that he was a perfect fit, but because the long wait was finally over and we could check one more thing off the pre-IPO countdown.
Then began the even longer hunt for a CFO and Eric quickly got into the spirit of things by letting everyone know we were “making progress” whenever anyone asked about the search. He also introduced a kind of continuously phase-shifting chronological ambiguity by responding to all questions about the IPO with the stock answer, “six to nine months.” As he put it, “Whatever today is, the answer will always be six to nine months from that date.”
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