Google execs created a video to stop the Jonathan Rosenberg

Sep 12, 2014 15:18 GMT  ·  By

Google is a company with a healthy sense of humor that lies well behind the serious façade it’s been building for years. This shines through on many occasions, including in Google+ posts, promotional videos, doodles or statements from the execs.

Everybody knows this, but it’s not often that we get a show of exactly how Google operates. Well, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of the company, shared a video from what seems like forever ago.

It was created by Wesley Chan, a former employee who worked on things like AdWords, Google Analytics and Google Voice. The video shows Google in 2003, when Jonathan Rosenberg, the current Senior Vice President for Product Management, would go about the office and “kill” the smiley balloons that were given to new employees with the company.

Back then, the famous colored hats were not yet introduced and Nooglers were given to the new employees to help staff identify them easily and to welcome them.

The video shows Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Marissa Mayer (now CEO of Yahoo), Ninette Wong, Susan Wojcicki (now CEO of YouTube), Salar Kamangar and more, some of which still work at Google. They talk about how they considered to found a business to develop pop-resistant balloons because the problem grew so much.

Google’s sense of humor

Of course, it’s all a gag and they were only trying to convince Rosenberg to stop popping balloons around the office. Either way, it’s a funny video that shows how the company works and what that 20% personal time is sometimes used for.

Schmidt says that in the end the video did the trick and the Smiley Balloons got to live another day.

“As you can see from this video, made by a concerned Googler (Wesley Chan) back in 2003, we tried many tactics to stop the carnage and even considered starting a new company (balloogle?) to develop Jonathan-proof smiley balloons. In the end, it was the video itself that did the trick. Humor can be a very effective way to get Hippos to correct a wayward course,” Schmidt wrote on his Google+ page.

It’s a window inside Google like we rarely get to see and experience first-hand. The corporate culture inside Google is quite strong and the company has managed to build a strong bond between employees. The perks that the company offers to those loyal to it can’t be ignored either.