Five Key Hires to Google's Success

Most founders today can only dream of scaling their startup to the size of Google and its parent company Alphabet.

Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page trailblazed search engine technology, harnessing the power of curiosity into a billion-dollar business.

As Google grew, founders Page and Brin stepped down from their C-suite roles in 2015 and formed Alphabet, so that it could expand to projects outside of internet search and advertising. Google’s parent company which now oversees 160 subsidiaries including Waymo, Fitbit, Sidewalk Labs and, of course, Google.

Employees at the company are affectionately known as “Googlers,” and Alphabet employs more than 100,000 of them around the world.

While there is no way to know of the countless contributions and individuals that helped list Google to where it is today, five people were strategically brought on board in Google’s earliest days that helped catapult the company to where it is today.

Here are five key hires that made Google, Google.

Craig Silverstein - Director of Technology

Time at Google: 1998-2012

Craig Silverstein was the first employee to join Google.

Silverstein met founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page while he was a grad student at Stanford. After listening to the two speak about the search engine they were building, Silverstein was intrigued by the project and wanted to help. He offered up his services that day and was brought on board to start programming using the early systems in Brin’s dorm room.

When they moved operations into a friend’s house in Menlo Park, Silverstein officially had the title of Director of Technology, a post he held until he left Google. Even though he shuffled through various projects and led several teams, his biggest contribution was building the original search engine that Google is known for.

Silverstein left in 2012 to build the edtech startup Khan Academy, where he still works today.

Heather Cairns - HR Manager

Time at Google: 1998 - 2005

Cairns perhaps stands out the most among Google’s early hires. As human resources manager, Cairns was employee number four and started not long after Silverstein.

Having an HR manager on board so early showed just how ambitious Page and Brin were to scale their budding company. It also proved to be a winning strategy. Cairns went on to hire the first 200 employees at Google, helping with recruitment and growing the headcount of the business up until its IPO in 2004. She also was instrumental in setting up HR policies and practices that are still used at the company today. Fun fact: Her voice is used on the early Google Voice voicemail box.

She left Google in 2005 and pursued many endeavors including philanthropy, angel investing and being a self-described “bum,” according to her LinkedIn. But Cairns hopped back into working life in 2012, and today she leads Coastal Streets, a real estate company in Massachusetts, as its president.

Urs Hölzle - Engineer

Time at Google: 1999-present

Hölzle was working as a computer science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara when he was scouted by Page and Brin.

He started in 1999 as Google’s eighth employee and has been with the company for more than 20 years. He’s a highly-respected figure in the engineering community—after all, he built the infrastructure for the biggest computer server on the planet. Today he works as SVP of Technical Infrastructure and oversees the design, installation and operation of Google’s servers, networks and data centers.

According to his org chart bio, Hölzle and his team have reduced the energy used by Google data centers to less than 50% of the industry average.

Harry Cheung - Software Engineer

Time at Google: 1999-2004

An original Google engineer, Cheung’s work as crawl engineer proved to be invaluable as Google became a master at indexing the web for information.

In fact, Cheung’s nickname around the office was “Spider-Man” because of the web spiders he used in his work.

These days, Cheung is an angel investor in several startups including Caviar and also a member of the board at Roostify, where he previously served as CTO.

Georges Harik - Software Engineer

Time at Google: 1999-2005

Harik was one of Google’s first 10 employees and most recently served as Product Development Manager. Without Harik, the Google suite of extended products such as Gmail, Google Talk and Google Video may have never existed.

Vitally, Harik was behind the idea for AdSense and the AdWords Online System that became the ultimate cash cow and sustainable business model that carried Google where it is today.

He left Google in 2005 and currently is an angel investor and advisor to several startups focused on machine learning, internet applications and advertising technologies.