The house that helped build Google

July 5, 2007 — -- Susan Wojcicki is reminiscing about her old home in Menlo Park, Calif.

"It's a very humble house, less than 2,000 square feet," she recalls fondly. A cozy, four-bedroom home -- and incredibly historic.

After earning her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki bought 232 Santa Margarita Ave. for about $600,000. She rented the garage to two Stanford students for $1,700 a month to help with the mortgage. The renters: no ordinary slackers, but the Google Guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who incubated Google right there.

"It's a good reminder for the company that we did come from a small house, not a fancy house," says Wojcicki.

Her life-changing decision to open her home to Brin and Page did more than just help start the world's most-popular search engine. It also:

If you've ever clicked a text ad on MySpace, About.com or any thousands of blogs with "Ads by Google," you've got Susan Wojcicki to thank. Expanding ads beyond Google's own search pages was her idea. Now, Google has asked her to further grow the empire by bringing its advertiser base to old media such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television.

"There are no sets of words that can be used to describe Susan's contribution to the company," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "She's historic, in terms of our company's founding. She's also one of those people who thinks very broadly and quickly, and (it's) deceiving because she's so pleasant."

Wojcicki is Google employee No. 18. Her early duties included refining the original Google logo designed by Brin and the overall spare look of the Google home page. She came up with the first of Google's "doodles," the remaking of the logo for holidays and other special events. Her first artistic doodle: an alien lands on Google.