I had dinner with Larry and Sergey! Well, almost. I had dinner in their cafeteria anyways. They could have been there. I was scanning the tables for the faces I’ve only seen in magazines.

I enjoyed raw food salads, some delicious roasted beet salad, tasty quinoa, pear sauce (like apple sauce but all pears), and a little piece of salmon. We were in the “healthy” cafeteria with notoriously not-so-good desserts but the rest was great.

Perhaps life in a big company is second nature to a lot of people. Things like resistance swimming pools, steam rooms, full gym, free snacks, complimentary 3 meals a day, juice bar, espresso bar, laundry, dry cleaning and alterations, and other bene’s may be old hat to some—but for this small business girl, it was wild! Actually, it was more like dorm life, except that they paid the people to be there.

My personal tour guide told me that Google is hiring some 100 people a week. They have some 400 recruiters employed. With those kinds of numbers, seems like I should be expecting my phone to ring some time in the next month. I’m sure they need a Simplifier. Maybe your phone will ring too.

Is this sustainable growth? Is it stable? Can an organism grow that quickly and maintain its intended form and function? We usually call entities that grow uncontrollably “cancer”. I suppose Google’s growth isn’t uncontrollable, nor is it all in one place. Offices are spread around the world. Expanding that quickly could indicate great flexibility. Almost on par with the flexibility demanded of a woman’s body in the last trimester of her 9 month journey. Am I really comparing Google to a pregnant woman? That’s just not right. Ok then.

Back to the swimming pools. When people are swimming, they have to have a life guard on duty. Immediately a scene popped in my head: I’m at the sweet little Café del Doge (I stepped right back to Venice, Italy in the middle of downtown Palo Alto!) and strike up conversation with good looking guy with sun-bleached hair. “So what do you do?” “I’m a life guard at Google,” he’d respond.

I wonder when Project Simplify will be big enough to hire a life guard…