Employee no 53, Charlie Ayers Jr, was the search engine’s first executive chef. And as the company grew, so did he. But burnout was inevitable.
What do tech honchos eat? Ask Charlie Ayers Jr, employee no 53 at Google. The year was 1998. Ayers, then 31, was working as a home chef for a family in California. It was the height of the dotcom bubble, and startups were mushrooming across Silicon Valley. The brightest minds were making a beeline for the holy grail of innovation. Everyone was hungry for their slice of the American dream. Ayers was at hand to give it to them.
In early 1999, a month-old ‘searchengine’ company launched a search of its own: to find the best chef in the Valley to cook at their new office. “When I didn’t receive a response to my application, I started sending them scones and desserts,” Ayers said in a podcast.
His persistence did not go in vain. Soon afterwards, he got a call from Google, asking him to come in for an interview with cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. “He [Page] came bounding out of the elevator on a hopping ball, and I had no idea [who he was],” Ayers had said in an earlier interview. Brin reportedly said that they were looking for a professional chef who could “grow with the Google culture, so that employees needn’t go out to grab lunch”.
Mixing crowds
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On his first day, he was asked to cook for around 50 people at Google’s new headquarters at Mountain View, California — the company had moved out of its makeshift garage office only a few months ago. “I felt like Homer Simpson, working with all these hugely intelligent people. In the beginning, it was everyone in one room — the people who invented the internet. And me,” he said. Google went public on August 19, 2004.
Burn out In the intervening years, the company had scaled up through accretion, both in revenue terms and in the number of its employees. However, the uptick in fortunes did not bode well for Ayers. “I had to get 10,000 meals ready in a day. It was tough. Burnout was inevitable. My health diminished drastically. I put on weight, and drove around campus in a golf cart,” he recalled.
Anthony Bourdain: The Chef Who Courted Controversy
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The culinary world - and others included - sunk into collective depression on Friday after news broke of Anthony Bourdain's death. The celebrity chef was in France working on an upcoming episode of his CNN series. His friend, French chef Eric Ripert, found him unresponsive in his hotel room on Friday morning.
The culinary world - and others included - sunk into collective depression on Friday after news broke of Anthony Bourdain's death. The celebrity chef was in France working on an upcoming episode of h..
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Bourdain followed up his literary success into a gig with Food Network hosting “A Cook’s Tour.” This happened to be his breakout moment with Bourdain’s signature programming approach — it followed the chef with the hangdog look, slightly hungover to exotic ports of call, trying out local cuisine and giving a sneak peek into foreign cultures.
He repeated the concept on the Travel Channel’s “No Reservations” and “The Layover”, both successful shows that aired from 2005 to 2013.
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Anthony Bourdain seen here with the outstanding informational series or special award for 'Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown' backstage at the 2015 Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles. As part of t..
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Bourdain was never too far from controversies. Apart from being admonished by some for cultural invasion, he was recently declared "persona non grata for his disrespect of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity and sovereignty." The Foreign Ministry spokesman of Azerbaijan told Agence France-Presse. "Filming a food show on Azerbaijan's occupied territory is an insult to one million Azerbaijani refugees who were forcefully expelled from their homes."
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As the company’s coffers swelled, so did the number of people on the payroll. The added responsibility was taking a toll on Ayers, a culinary aesthete inured to cooking gourmet meals for smaller groups. “I spoke to a financial analyst who said that the company is going to blow up like no other in history. He advised me to scrape up some money and avail the employee stock option. [At that time] It was two cents per share,” he said. Ayers approached his father for a loan of $14,000 for 700,000 shares in Google. “Google is a sham. I love you and so I am going to help you. If it works, then good for everyone. Otherwise, you will learn your lesson and pay me back all that money,” is what Ayers Sr said to his son. And he couldn’t have been more wrong.
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Ayers quit Google in 2006. And like many of the early employees, the tech giant made him a multimillionaire — his stock options were worth $40 million at the time. He then went on to write a cookbook with tips and recipes based on his experience, and opened a restaurant, Calafia in San Francisco, which shut down last year.
