They had a lot of crazy smart employees. Aside from Linus, one of Quake's authors worked there. And I had a Google coworker (who, while at Google, wrote the C

They had a lot of crazy smart employees. Aside from Linus, one of Quake's authors worked there. And I had a Google coworker (who, while at Google, wrote the C++ framework that all their C++ webservers are based on, and also was one of the early engineers on Dart) who was a Transmeta alum, and had previously worked on Hotspot before that. It's one of those companies like General Magic and Symbolics that were complete failures in the marketplace, but are known for their alumni network. Even though the product didn't go anywhere, the tech that went into the product was incredibly impressive, and the engineers that built that tech are top-notch.