Story: Inside Early Google - Race Conditions, Java Pain, and the Birth of AdWords

About this episode

This episode discusses Ron Garret's experience building Google AdWords and the challenges faced during its creation.

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 fills with declines. Numbers he can't explain. Some of them look… real. How do you even name what's happening? This episode is about creating Google AdWords. Building the machine that prints money, while trying not to get crushed in the gears. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter

People in this episode

Host: Adam Gordon Bell

Guest: Ron Garret

Topics covered

• Google AdWords
• software engineering
• startups
• Java programming
• race conditions
• early tech history

Keywords

• Google
• AdWords
• Java
• software development
• startups
• race conditions
• JSPs

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Google, JPL

Products: AdWords, Java, JSPs

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