Marissa Mayer: I was there the day we did the first Street View experiments. It was a Saturday and we just wanted to blow off some steam. We rented an $8,000 camera from Wolf Camera that was considerably less when rented per day. We drove around in a little blue Volkswagen Bug with the camera on a tripod in the passenger seat. We just started driving around Palo Alto taking a photo every 15 seconds, and then, at the end of the day, we took photo-stitching software to see if we could stitch the pictures together.

Heather Cairns: Larry and Sergey were first and foremost, and probably still are, inventors. That was their true love.

Marissa Mayer: I hosted weekly brainstorming sessions because we wanted people to think big. One week I started the session with the space tether. We started brainstorming about building it out of carbon nanotubes, and could we use it to do pizza delivery to the moon?

Douglas Edwards: Sergey would just throw out these marketing ideas. He wanted to project our logo on the Moon. He wanted to take the entire marketing budget and use it to help Chechen refugees. He wanted to make Google-branded condoms that we would give out to high schools. There were a lot of ideas that were floated and most of them never became full-fledged projects. But if Larry and Sergey suggested something you pretty much had to take it at face value for a while.

Marissa Mayer: Some things we actually did go out and build—like driverless cars. We brainstormed that.

Biz Stone: It was just strange, it was really weird, but it was awesome, too.

Charlie Ayers: The whole climate of the company was a focus on growth, growth, growth.

Heather Cairns: I would say that by 2003, it’s a very different place than when we started. We’re like 2,000 people, and people were talking about going public.

Heather Cairns: Going public. Being rich. Going public. Going public. That was really on the forefront of so many people’s minds.

Charlie Ayers: At that point there were a lot of us who had been there forever, who pretty much would just come to hang out. They were waiting, not even working anymore. You were seeing that happen with a lot of people.

Ray Sidney: I got burnt out. I was not feeling very productive. I thought, You know what? I need to get away.

Charlie Ayers: A lot of the early-timers were looking at, like, How much does this island cost? There was a lot of distraction.

Ray Sidney: Originally I thought, You know what? I just need to take a month or two off, and then I’ll kind of get that fire back in my belly. And that never happened. I left in March of 2003.

Charlie Ayers: As the I.P.O. got closer, the level of distraction got greater and greater and greater. Their eyelids were too heavy with dollar signs.

John Battelle, founding editor of Wired, entrepreneur, author: With the benefit of hindsight, Google’s I.P.O. in 2004 was as important as the Netscape I.P.O. in 1995. Everyone got excited about the Internet in the late 90s, but the truth was a very small percentage of the world used it. Google went public after the dot-com crash and re-established the Web as a medium.

Douglas Edwards: After the I.P.O., it became more buttoned-up, more metrics driven—which was good for the company, probably. But it was not the culture that I was used to and had enjoyed when I was there.

Charlie Ayers: They’re like, “We’re publicly traded now.” So 2004 was not the best year at Google, morale-wise. They started sending more of us to Dale Carnegie classes.

Heather Cairns: Larry and Sergey used to hold their forks and knives in a fist, scooping. They used to scoop food into their mouths, which would be a couple of inches from the plate and I’d be like, I can’t even watch this. I can’t. I’m going to be sick. They had to be taught not to do that.

Charlie Ayers: There were a handful of us that would go to public-speaking classes, media-training classes, leadership classes.

Heather Cairns: Nobody has superbad, disgusting behavior anymore. It’s really depressing. The personality has been coached out of them—all of them.

This article has been adapted from Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom), published by Twelve.