Eat Google!

It started with two students in a garage and became a billion-dollar giant.

One of the men at the heart of the Google empire has disclosed the secrets behind its rise to become the world’s most popular search engine, the fifth-largest company on NYSE and a brand worth twice as much as Coca-Cola.

Charlie Ayers has revealed that from the beginning, Google was based not just on groundbreaking computer technology, but on a revolutionary approach to food.

It began in 1998, when Page and Brin started Google in a friend’s garage near Stanford University in California. A few months later, they recruited Ayers. Now 42, he remembers: “They said: ‘We are not going to charge for food here, ever.’

“I said: ‘That’s crazy.’ They explained my job was to create this ambience, to build this captivated audience where people wanted to come in super-early and stay super-late. They interviewed me above a bicycle shop.

“They thought they were going to go global. I thought: ‘Good luck’. The way they were playing with children’s toys, I had no idea they were doing any work.”

He signed up and started easing the computer engineers into the long hours culture with innovations including free beer and fortnightly “big ass” barbecues, and breakfast specials. He converted the “googlers” to a diet that ensured they kept working after lunch. As explained in his new book, Eat Yourself Smart.

His faith in the profit-making power of raw food extended to generous offerings of sushi — “the fat found in fish helps make the cell membranes round the brain more elastic and more able to absorb nutrients easily”.

Via Telegraph