Everyone knows “the Google guys” — Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the multibillionaire founders of the world’s most popular search engine. But another Google guy was there from the company’s creation 12 years ago — Craig Silverstein, a slightly built, witty software engineer who was Google’s first employee.

Like Page and Brin, Silverstein was a computer science graduate student at Stanford in the late 1990s, when he got wind of the search algorithm that would ultimately become Google. Silverstein wasn’t a close friend of either Page or Brin at the time, but with a more formal background in search than either of the founders, he saw the world-changing potential of their work. And he knew he wanted to be part of it.

Like the founders, Silverstein never did get his doctorate , but the past dozen years haven’t exactly been wasted time. Silverstein worked side by side with the founders to establish Google’s distinct culture and wrote his fair share of the nascent search engine’s base code. As Google’s first employee, his net worth has been estimated somewhere north of $800 million.

Now based in Google’s New York offices, where he is working on making some of the internal programming code that Google developed available free for programmers around the world, Silverstein sat down with the Mercury News during a recent visit to the Googleplex in Mountain View. From attributing Google’s success to “luck,” to defending charges that the company “sold out” in its proposed deal with Verizon over net neutrality, Silverstein’s tenure allows him to say things most Googlers can’t. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did the initial generation of Googlers create the company’s unique culture?

A: You don’t hatch it. It’s not like you sit around saying, “I wonder what I want the culture to be.” You have a culture in mind that you want it to be, that reflects your own personality, and then you hire to fit it. We all pretty much wanted the same culture, which was all the best parts of grad school, basically “… a lot of self-starting, the ability to pick your own projects, the idea that you are encouraged or supposed to find better ways of doing something. You are not supposed to take the received wisdom for granted about the way to do something.

Q: What were your contributions to that culture?

A: The M&Ms. (Google is full of well-stocked break rooms that include candy and other snacks.)

Q: But seriously?

A: There are these cultures you see in some companies — they are just very negative, where the way that you show you are the hot shot engineer is by showing how stupid everyone else’s idea is, or how bad everyone else’s code is. And honestly, we see that more at Google now then we used to when it was small. And part of it is we’ve got people who were used to these other cultures; it’s a very prevalent, sort of alpha-dog culture you see in the programming world. But it’s never been part of Google’s culture. And I think even when you see it now, it’s not as respected. The respected voices say, hey cut it out. And I think that comes from Larry and Sergey, but especially me, since I was the one doing a lot of the hands-on programming very early. Larry and Sergey used to spend a lot of time on the other issues that I wasn’t worrying about at all, like getting money. So I think the culture here is much friendlier.

Q: Some critics say a more idealistic Google of five years ago never would have made the deal with Verizon.

A: It would not have happened five years ago because we never would have been involved in something so political five years ago. Certainly, we now have critics based on political issues that we wouldn’t have had a long time ago, just because we were too small to interest political thinkers. Whether we wouldn’t have made a decision like that, which is kind of a compromise, five years ago — I think people misjudge us if that’s what they think. We’ve always been pragmatic. Our goal has always been to get things done. That’s not to say we don’t have ideals. Our feeling is that what we did with Verizon is consistent with our beliefs and consistent with our past policies.

Q: As Google’s leadership has grown older, has its leadership needed to be less idealistic?

A: I’ve seen enough of what’s gone on in the past decade to feel confident that the culture comes from the top, and the top hasn’t changed at Google for a very long time. And so for people to say the culture has changed — “Now they’re this big materialistic company, where before they were idealistic” — to my mind suggests that the people at the top have changed; they’ve become different people. If they were going to change, they would have changed at the IPO when they became multibillionaires. Why would they change now? It doesn’t make any sense. They didn’t change then; they haven’t changed now, and I feel the culture has been very consistent, and I feel it will be very consistent as long as the same people are at the top.

Q: Has all that money changed the early Googlers?

A: Certainly some people have changed, but it’s not clear whether they’ve changed or they are just able to do what they’ve always wanted to do. There are people who have retired and traveled around the world, and there are people who have left and done charity stuff, and there are people who have left and become angel investors, and there are people who are still here, punching the clock every day, just like they always did. There are people who are mostly the same, and now they fly first class.

Q: How have the work lives changed of the early hires who stayed at Google?

A: What all the early hires do has changed a lot. We have all specialized in areas we never would have thought we would be in. We are all managing more than we would have thought of at that time. But because of the kind of people we were looking for, flexibility being a large part of that, all these changes have happened, but nothing that’s important really changes.

Q: What are you most proud of at Google?

A: I feel a lot of our success is due to luck. I guess what I’m most proud of is successfully keeping the culture as well as we have, given all the success and growth that we’ve had. I’m proud of that. We haven’t done perfectly, but we’ve done a lot better than I ever thought we would.

Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories.