Name: In the plex
ISBN: 9781416596585

In the plex

Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers. Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works. While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow, Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more. The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking.

What Hacker News says

buzzertApr 2023

I learned this from Steven Levy's great book, "In the Plex": https://www.amazon.com/Plex-Google-Thinks-Works-Shapes/dp/14...

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dekhnJan 2023

better to join google and go through all the internal history docs, memes (from the beginning) and ask the old timers.

The best books I've read (in terms of truthfully representing what it's like On the Inside) are In The Plex (hilarious because Hackers is what got me to Google), How Google Works (a bit silly, but does have some business knowledge from eric), Voices From The Valley.

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RubberShoesJul 2022

Google acquiring YouTube

"In the Plex" by Steven Levy goes into great detail on how YouTube could not survive its growth without the infrastructure and ad technologies Google brought to the platform.

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fossuserApr 2022

I’ll second code - I love that book and haven’t found a better explanation elsewhere.

For more general history, Hackers, The Dream Machine, Crypto, and to a lesser extent What The Dormouse Said are all good.

I’d add in In The Plex, Masters of Doom, and Facebook: The Inside Story for company specific books.

I haven’t ready show stopper yet, but that’s on my list.

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lupireJan 2022

If you don't present the downside, you are betting your career that your coworkers don't know the downside or aren't willing to present it in order to take you down. There is a great story about this in In The Plex book, about an exec who sabotaged another by encouraging him to propose a project and then embarrassing him in the meeting with the founders.

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spondylFeb 2021

> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem.

I can recommend reading In The Plex. Quite literally the founders wanted to invert the usual model and put engineers first. There were some anecdotes from those in roles like marketing and so on that they felt like second class citizens.

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