Three-month deadline and learning while doing

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.

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