The unassuming house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been empty for only a couple of years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google a decade previous. Here was the garage once packed with newly delivered servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms at the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first employee Craig Silverstein churned out code; out the window was the backyard with the hot tub.
In Google’s infancy the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent unused space. “They entered through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed to enter the front door.”
Wojcicki found herself hanging out with the young…
