Google's First Recruit Leaves for Start-up

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 10 February 2012, 21:33 IST   |    1 Comments
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Craig Silverstein Google+ image

Bangalore: Google today has grown to become such a huge part of our lives today, and one of the people who have helped Google take the course of what it is, would be Craig Silverstein. Siverstein was Google’s first hire, (technically Google employee #3, since he joined right after Larry Page and Sergey Brin-- Google’s founders).

But All Things D, a branch of the Wall Street Journal, reported that Silverstein (according to his farewell email), will be moving on to pursue the vision of "making the world a better place by making information more accessible and useful", in a "slightly different way", at Khan Academy-- a non-profit education start-up. The academy produces online videos, exercises and testing materials related to math, science, humanities, and finance in an attempt to educate students in countries where educational resources aren't easily available. He will be joining as a developer at Khan, with February 10, 2012 as his last day at Google.

The years from 1998 have seen Silverstein bring his technical experience to the search engine as its Technology Director, establish its work culture, and write a fair share of the search algorithm Google uses.  Silverstein started working on Google when it was a research project at the Stanford University led by Page and Brin (who were graduate students in computer science at the time). Over time, he left Stanford and his doctoral studies to work for Google when the company was founded in 1998 in a car garage in Menlo Park, California. Page and Brin too never got to complete their doctorates.

In a 2010 interview with Mercury News, “There are these cultures you see in some companies -- they are just very negative, where the way that you show you are the hot shot engineer is by showing how stupid everyone else's idea is, or how bad everyone else's code is. And honestly, we see that more at Google now then we used to when it was small. But it's never been part of Google's culture. I think the culture here is much friendlier,” said Silverstein. He also said that what he was really proud of at Google was “successfully keeping the culture as well as we have, given all the success and growth that we've had.”“We haven't done perfectly, but we've done a lot better than I ever thought we would,” he added.