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 listeners inside Google headquarters - the Googleplex - to explain
how Google works.

While they were still students at Stanford, Google co-founders 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 (until Google's IPO, nobody other than Google management
had any idea how lucrative the company's ad business was), 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. After it's unapologetically elitist approach
to hiring, Google pampers its engineers with free food and dry cleaning, on-
site doctors and masseuses, and gives them all the resources they need to
succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off
on every hire.

But has Google lost its innovative edge? It stumbled badly in China. And now,
with its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful
competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for
smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be
"evil" still compete?

No other book has turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.
This edition of In the Plex includes an exclusive interview with Google's
Marissa Mayer, one of the company's earliest hires and most visible executives,
as well as the youngest woman to ever make Fortune's "50 Most Powerful Women
in Business" list. She provides a high-level insider's perspective on the
company's life story, its unique hiring practices, its new social networking
initiative, and more.

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