Ming had just visited Twitter’s office that morning. I didn’t go with him so I could spend more time in the Web 2.0 Summit so I asked him how it was. He said it was nice but the environment there wasn’t much different from the Nuffnang/ChurpChurp offices we have back in Asia. Like it’s open concept, people sit together, we had lots of entertainment etc etc. One big difference though was Twitter’s office was of course bigger since they have some 300 employees to house.
So after Ming’s visit to Twitter we headed down to the Google HQ in Mountain View called The Googleplex. Now when Ming got there, he was blown away. I mean Google’s HQ was by far better than our offices back home or Twitter’s office or ANY office in the world!
It took us a 45-60 minute drive from San Francisco but heck when you’re in America you drive everywhere all the time, 45-60 minute doesn’t feel very long at all. When the GPS took us to the last traffic light junction before we entered the Googleplex, we knew we had reached just by the name of the street. The signboard on top of the traffic light read “Google”.
Not “Google Road” or “Google Street” or anything like that. Just “GOOGLE”.
The entire area was huge! There were so many buildings that we got lost for a while but finally made it to the right building where a Google staff was waiting to take us for a tour. We walked through the side of a building there
and when we got through we came across a sandbox that acted as a beach volleyball court.
On it were Google employees playing beach volleyball in the middle of the workday.
Then we passed some small little things. Like this little table thing that was made to look like a bicycle.
Or this Google Map marker for a really well-known Fish n Chips restaurant on the campus.
There was a lot of security too. Security guards were dressed in smart polo-Ts walking around and a lot of them got around on these bikes.
When we finally got to the front of the building we were supposed to go into, there was a big outdoor area with tables armed with umbrellas of different colours for Google staff to sit outside and have their meals. The weather there was cooling though so it was perfect to sit outside. Kinda felt like being in an air-conditioned room all the time.
Next to the sitting area there was this little organic vegetable garden where they planted all sorts of vegetables.
A sign there said that you could go ahead and take whatever you want to eat.
Food is free there at Google. You could have anything you want. Burgers, sandwiches and you could even have Japanese food or stuff like that. There was even a juicebar where you could get a smoothie or fresh juice.
The tour then took us to enter one of the buildings. Once you walk into the lobby of the building you would see projected high on the wall was real-time updates on what people all around the world were searching for at that very moment.
I stood there for a long time curiously looking at what people were looking for every second. Everything from “College Oprah went to” to even someone searching “MEET ME IN THE PARKING LOT” (for some reason).
Ming managed to pull me away from the projector screen to get a picture taken so one day many years from now we would remember we were there in that lobby.
When we went deeper into the building I came across a wall with a Google logo on it.
As I went closer though noticed that it wasn’t just a logo of Google but actually pictures of all the staff at Google.
Then we came across this.
I don’t even know what to call it but it’s like a “Google Earth” station. There were many many screens around it and you could search anywhere on Google Earth and it would come up on all those screens. Because the images were so big and clear, it kinda made you feel as if you were really there.
We saw lots of other things in the building but before we could take more pictures, a security guard came and told us that we weren’t allowed to take pictures in the building. Further inside we saw:
1) A huge cafeteria with lots of food
2) A pantry that had all sorts of chocolate bars and candy (all free by the way)
3) A laundry room where Google staff could come and do their laundry for free.
and we saw a gym that was so big and so well equipped it put Fitness First to shame. Everything… free!
They also took us to the Google Store in there where they had all sorts of cool Google merchandise like t-shirts, mugs etc etc. I ended up buying a Google Maps shirt but I’ll show that in my next entry. The stuff there were so cool it made me wonder for a while why they didn’t open stores like this everywhere else in the world.
We walked through only two of their buildings but the whole thing took us a couple of hours. If I were to just describe the Googleplex to someone I would just say “Think of a really nice university campus”.
“Then, think of a campus 100 times nicer than that and everything there was free!”.
The whole campus was Wi-Fi’ed up too. Everywhere you went you could hook up to the fastest internet connection ever. I guess that’s for people who might’ve wanted to work while sitting out on the grass one nice summer day. People at Google didn’t wear work clothes. They wore casual clothes or whatever they wanted to wear to work.
I also noticed that the people who work at Google were from all over the world. There were people from China, Germany, France even… and everywhere you could think of. The thing about Google though is that most of the people there are Software Engineers. So unless you’re a good programmer or something, it might be a little hard getting a job there.
We walked out of the Googleplex after some 2 hours and went back to the car park where our car was parked. They had all sorts of cars there, even saw an Aston Martin and some really nice cars which I’m guessing belonged to some early employees of Google who made it rich from their stock options. One popular car I noticed there though was the Prius. Seems like everyone there loves hybrid cars and is all about being “environmentally friendly”.
The Googleplex is definitely the nicest office in the world and definitely the nicest office I had ever been to. Really made me want to work there myself.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space