Episode
Story: Inside Early Google - Race Conditions, Java Pain, and the Birth of AdWords
CoRecursive: Coding Stories · Jan 2, 2026 · 38 min
Ron Garret left JPL for a 100-person startup he'd just discovered on Usenet. Four a.m. alarms. Burbank to San Jose on Southwest. A rented room in Susan Wojcicki's house. He expected the search engine engineering and instead he got asked to build ad serving. In Java and with JSPs and no syntax highlighting and no delimiter balancing. Launch week was a stampede and then a window on his screen…