Sergey Brin

"START WITH TRIP REPORTS For more than a decade, Eric held his weekly staff meetings on Mondays at 1 p.m. In many ways, these meetings were pretty much like any other staff meeting you might have been to. There was an agenda, check-ins with everyone around the table, people surreptitiously checking email and texts . . . all the usual stuff. Eric did one thing different from the norm, though: when everyone had come into the room and gotten settled, he’d start by asking what people did for the weekend, or, if they had just come back from a trip, he’d ask for an informal trip report. This was a staff that included Larry Page and Sergey Brin, so often the weekend report included kiteboarding tales or updates from the world of extreme fitness, but it also could skew toward the more mundane: Jonathan’s daughter’s latest soccer achievements, or engineering lead Alan Eustace’s score on the golf course.* Sometimes, if he had just returned from a business trip, Eric offered his own report, putting a Google map on the screen with pins dropped on the cities where he’d visited. He’d go city by city, talking about his trip and the interesting things he’d observed. While this conversation seemed impromptu and informal at first glance, it was a part of a communications approach that Bill had developed over the years and improved in collaboration with Eric. The objectives were twofold. First, for team members to get to know each other as people, with families and interesting lives outside of work. And second, to get everyone involved in the meeting from the outset in a fun way, as Googlers and human beings, and not just as experts and owners of their particular roles. Bill and Eric understood that there’s a direct correlation between fun work environments and higher performance, with conversation about family and fun (what academics might call “socioemotional communication”) being an easy way to achieve the former. Later in the meeting, when business decisions were being discussed, Eric wanted everyone to weigh in, regardless of whether the issue touched on their functional area or not. The simple communications practice—getting people to share stories, to be personal with each other—was in fact a tactic to ensure better decision making and camaraderie. “At first I thought it was really weird,” Dick Costolo says of the trip report practice, which he also learned from Bill. “But when I started doing it and seeing it in practice, wow, it really makes a difference. The whole dynamic of the meeting changes, you get more empathy, a better mood.” Dick tells the story of how he attended the staff meeting of a CEO he was mentoring, and the meeting started with hot topics and issues—no social talk whatsoever. “It really hit me in the face how jarring that was. I couldn’t tell how well the team worked together and connected.”"

"Back in LA, Musk had dinner at a Beverly Hills steakhouse with a friend and early Tesla investor, Jason Calacanis. Musk was in a dark place. His third rocket had just exploded on liftoff, and SpaceX would go under if the fourth did. Calacanis had read that Tesla only had four weeks of money left; he asked Musk if that was true. No, Musk said. Three weeks. Musk confided that a friend had loaned him money so he could cover his personal expenses. There were other benefactors: Bill Lee, Al Gore’s son-in-law, invested $2 million, and Sergey Brin put in $500,000. Some employees were even writing checks, not sure they’d ever see the money again. Things looked bleak. Still, Musk said he wanted to show Calacanis something. He pulled out his BlackBerry and revealed a picture of a clay mockup of the Model S. “That’s gorgeous,” Calacanis said. “How much can you make it for?” “Well, it’s going to go 200 miles,” Musk said. “I think we can make it for $50,000 or $60,000.” That night Calacanis returned home and wrote out two checks for $50,000 each and a note to Musk: “Elon, looks like an incredible car…I’ll take two!”"

"The Missed Opportunity One day in the late 1990s, during a break in the lunch rush, about five or six people dressed in T-shirts and hoodies came into the shop all at once. Their attire was lackluster, and they didn’t give off an energetic vibe, so I apologetically thought, “What an unremarkable group.” Since it was after the peak of the lunch hour, I asked, “Where do you work?” One of them, sitting at the counter, answered, “Google.” At that time, I was still interested in stock investment. Apologizing to the customers, I often evaluated the appearance, manner of speaking, and atmosphere of those who seemed to be starting ventures, thinking, “How about this company as an investment?” They explained that Google was an internet search company, but that alone wasn’t clear to me. I later looked it up on the internet, but with Yahoo already public and thriving for several years, we judged that Google wouldn’t catch on. As you know, Google later made great strides. Recently, I heard that their stock price surpassed $1,000. That day, among the customers sitting at the counter, I think the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were also there. It’s a shame not to be able to seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But there’s no point in lamenting over the fish that got away."