Diary of a Techie

SAN FRANCISCO – Ms Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future.

On a lark, she answered an advertisement for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at US$450 ($650) a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Ms Brown retired – cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value.

“I’m happy I saved enough stock for a rainy day and lately it’s been pouring,” said Ms Brown, 52, who now lives in a 280-sqm house in Nevada, gets her own massages at least once a week and has a private Pilates instructor. She has travelled the world to oversee a charitable foundation she started with her Google wealth and has written a book, still unpublished, Giggle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google.

According to documents filed last Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google employees and former employees are holding options they can cash in BOOMTOWN: An employee at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Worth about US$2.1 billion. In addition, current employees are sitting on stock and unvested options, or options they cannot immediately cash in, that together have a value of about US$4.1 billion.

Although no one keeps an official count of Google millionaires, it is estimated that 1,000 people each have more than US$5 million worth of Google shares from stock grants and stock options.

One founder, Mr Larry Page, has stocks worth US$20 billion. The other, Mr Sergey Brin, has slightly less, US$19.6 billion, according to Equilar, an executive compensation

At Google, the sensibility is more nuanced, they say. “It isn’t considered ‘Google’ to check the stock price,” said an engineer, using the Google jargon for what is acceptable in the company’s culture.

Others admit that, when gathered around the espresso machine, it is hard to avoid the topic of their sudden windfalls.

“It’s clear that people are taking nicer vacations,” said one Google engineer, who asked not to be identified because it is also not Google to talk about personal fortunes made at the company. “And one of the guys who works for me but has been there longer showed up at work in a really, really nice new car.”

Google, like many Silicon Valley companies, gives each of its new employee’s stock options, as well as a smaller number of shares of Google stock, as a recruiting incentive.
The idea of employment at a place with such a high stock price is appealing, but it also can make the company less attractive to a new employee. Mr Jordan Moncharmont, 21, a senior at Stanford University who was given stock options after he started working at Facebook part time, said Google’s high stock price can be a disincentive as it translates to a high exercise price for options. “You’d have to spend a boat-load of cash to exercise your options.”

Filed under: Computing