Google (GOOG)

Culture and Employees

We take great pride in our company culture and embrace it as one of our fundamental strengths. Our culture encourages the iteration of ideas to address complex technical challenges. In addition, we embrace individual thinking and creativity. As an example, we encourage our engineers to devote as much as 20% of their time to work on independent projects. Many of our significant new products have come from these independent projects, including Google News, AdSense for content and orkut.

We began as a technology company and have evolved into a software, technology, internet, advertising and media company all rolled into one. We take technology innovation very seriously. We compete aggressively for talent, and our people drive our innovation, technology development and operations. We strive to hire the best computer scientists and engineers to help us solve very significant challenges across systems design, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, networking, software engineering, testing, distributed systems, cluster design and other areas. We work hard to provide an environment where these talented people can have fulfilling jobs and produce technological innovations that have a positive effect on the world through daily use by millions of people.

We have assembled what we believe is a highly talented group of employees. Despite our rapid growth, we constantly seek to maintain a small-company feel that promotes interaction and the exchange of ideas among employees. We try to minimize corporate hierarchy to facilitate meaningful communication among employees at all levels and across departments. We believe that considering multiple viewpoints is critical to developing effective solutions, and we attempt to build consensus in making decisions. While teamwork is one of our core values, we also significantly reward individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. As we grow, we expect to continue to provide compensation structures that are more similar to those offered by start-ups than established companies. We focus on very significant rewards for individuals and teams that build amazing things that provide significant value to us, our advertisers and our users.

At December 31, 2008, we had 20,222 employees, consisting of 7,254 in research and development, 8,002 in sales and marketing, 3,109 in general and administrative and 1,857 in operations. All of Google’s employees are also equityholders, with significant collective employee ownership. As a result, many employees are highly motivated to make the company more successful.

Culture and Employees

Culture and Employees

We take great pride in our company culture and embrace it as one of our fundamental strengths. Our culture encourages the iteration of ideas to address complex technical challenges. In addition, we embrace individual thinking and creativity. As an example, we encourage our engineers to devote as much as 20% of

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their time to work on independent projects. Many of our significant new products have come from these independent projects, including Google News, AdSense for content and orkut.

We began as a technology company and have evolved into a software, technology, internet, advertising and media company all rolled into one. We take technology innovation very seriously. We compete aggressively for talent, and our people drive our innovation, technology development and operations. We strive to hire the best computer scientists and engineers to help us solve very significant challenges across systems design, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, networking, software engineering, testing, distributed systems, cluster design and other areas. We work hard to provide an environment where these talented people can have fulfilling jobs and produce technological innovations that have a positive effect on the world through daily use by millions of people.

We have assembled what we believe is a highly talented group of employees. Despite our rapid growth, we constantly seek to maintain a small-company feel that promotes interaction and the exchange of ideas among employees. We try to minimize corporate hierarchy to facilitate meaningful communication among employees at all levels and across departments, and we have developed software to help us in this effort. We believe that considering multiple viewpoints is critical to developing effective solutions, and we attempt to build consensus in making decisions. While teamwork is one of our core values, we also significantly reward individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. As we grow, we expect to continue to provide compensation structures that are more similar to those offered by start-ups than established companies. We will focus on very significant rewards for individuals and teams that build amazing things that provide significant value to us, our advertisers and our users.

At December 31, 2007, we had 16,805 employees, consisting of 5,788 in research and development, 6,647 in sales and marketing, 2,844 in general and administrative and 1,526 in operations. All of Google’s employees are also equityholders, with significant collective employee ownership. As a result, many employees are highly motivated to make the company more successful.

Culture and Employees