Why did we decide to front-load our people investment by focusing on an unorthodox approach to hiring? We had no choice. Google started with two guys in a dorm room, in a crowded market where users could abandon us for competitors with just a single mouse click. Since the beginning, we knew that the only way to compete would be to have the most accurate, fastest search product in the world, but thought we would never have enough engineers to build what we needed: Web crawlers to identify and categorize everything on the Internet, algorithms to sift meaning from what was out there, tools to
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