I’m not kidding about this. We actually have found a Google insider who’s going to spill his guts on this blog. Imagine a cross between Fake Steve and Mini-Microsoft and you get the idea. This is 100% for real, people. This is the guest blogger that Iulia and Natasha told me about, the one they have waiting in the on-deck circle. (BTW, try explaining to a pair of Russian girls what “on-deck circle” means.)
All I know about the guy is that he grew up with Iulia in Krasnodar and now works at Google in Mountain View and he’s totally dying to tell the world what’s really going on behind the razor wire at the world’s second-most-secretive company.
He’s going to write under the pen name of Nikolai Gogol. I’ve seen some of his stuff and he appears to be fluent in English so I’m assuming he’s like Sergey, a Russian who came here as a kid. But the girls won’t tell me anything. They say the guy is freaked out about secrecy and won’t let anyone know who he is, not even me. (Though he worships me, and considers me his inspiration, of course.)
He’s not even posting directly. He’ll send stuff to Iulia from an Internet cafe, and Iulia will post it for him. Iulia says Nikolai is terrified that Squirrel Boy and his goons will go ballistic trying figure out who he is. You know what? He should be scared. Because Eric and Larry and Sergey are total control freaks, and they are going to lose their mud when they see what this guy starts dishing.
The girls have created a profile for Nikolai, and it’s worth checking out. They’ve also created one for Iulia and given her permission to post so that she can help manage the site. Because frankly if this stuff gets ugly, I want no part of it. Just like with the options backdating. I’ll toss the interns under the bus and insist that I never knew anything about the guy. Which I don’t. Not at all. So there.
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