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> His answer was that there were a lot of unknowns facing Google and the only insurance they had for dealing with them was to have a lot of capital. Waaaat? I

> His answer was that there were a lot of unknowns facing Google and the only insurance they had for dealing with them was to have a lot of capital. Waaaat? I was at that TGIF and I do not recall any response remotely resembling the one you recount here. And: as far as I can figure, it's basically impossible that your $30 million figure is accurate. This is not based on internal knowledge, just a quick product search that finds water bottles available to consumers for 10c a bottle. The number you mentioned would mean that Google was supplying 15k water bottles per employee per year (300 million water bottles among 20k permanent employees; remember, there were much fewer Googlers in 2007). I would guess, again, based on no special internal knowledge, that the amount was closer to 3M. If anyone believes that 2007 Google cared about 3M in the bank, I have a bridge to sell them.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Well if you remember the bottled water centi-thread then perhaps you remember the discussions on that thread about cost and where the 30M from was $2/bottle for 'SmartWater' * 3 bottles a day * 365 days a year * 14,200 employees. That was the "crazy worst case" number of $30,660,000 per year. "If anyone believes that 2007 Google cared about 3M in the bank, I have a bridge to sell them." And whatever they cared about the money ($3M or $30M) they cared even less about the impact on engineers choice of place to work by deciding to stop spending it. And that lack of caring was the entire point of the question. If you have the tape you can remind me offline what Eric's exact responses was, my best recollection was that it was as I gave it. (Not that I expected much different)