In the Plex
In one sentence: Steven Levy's 2011 biography of Google, built on rare inside access, is a source the Acquired hosts lean on more than once through the Google episode; David names it directly: "a great book that we used as a source for the episode."
Overview
Levy, a longtime Newsweek and Wired writer, got access to Google that outside journalists almost never receive, and used it to reconstruct the company's path from a Stanford dorm-room research project to a global advertising empire. The book's most dramatic sequence covers spring/summer 1999, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin took their search technology, still called BackRub at the time, to Vinod Khosla (then a Kleiner Perkins partner and an Excite board member) and struck a roughly $1 million licensing deal, part cash and part Excite stock, on the condition that the two of them would spend that summer working at Excite, wiring BackRub into Excite's own search product, before heading back to Stanford in the fall. In the demo, a side-by-side test pitted BackRub against Excite's own algorithm: the results were so precise that users clicked once and left, and Excite's CEO killed the deal on the spot rather than sacrifice the page-view stickiness portals depended on. That rejection sent Page and Brin back to Stanford and, indirectly, toward becoming Google. The book also reprints in full a 2007 internal email from Google product manager Justin Rosenstein to colleagues, describing the newly ascendant Facebook as "that company": the kind that shows up once in a very long while, still small enough that every employee matters, "the kind you know you'll kick yourself in three years if you don't jump on the bandwagon now." Google had been "that company" once; Microsoft was the one before it.
Why It's Recommended
David flags the source directly while telling the Excite story: "Supposedly—this is according to In the Plex, Steven Levy's book, a great book that we used as a source for the episode." Later, in the episode's closing "quintessence" segment, David reaches for the book again, reading the full Rosenstein email as his summary verdict on what Google was. That's not a single drive-by citation: it's a source doing real narrative work at two separate, structurally important points in the episode. It's worth reading because Levy got access outside reporters rarely get, and used it to preserve the moments that, in hindsight, look inevitable but at the time were genuinely up for grabs, like a portal CEO one decision away from owning what became Google.
Source
A core source for Google: The Origin of Search: the Excite/Vinod Khosla licensing deal details, Michael Moritz's line about the 1999 funding environment ("Nobody's feet were on the ground."), and the full text of Justin Rosenstein's 2007 internal email are all drawn directly from this book. (First published 2011 by Simon & Schuster.)
The book turns up again as a source in Google: The AI Company: the anecdote of Noam Shazeer and colleague George Herrick, over lunch in a Google micro-kitchen, landing on the idea that compressing data is technically equivalent to understanding it, the spark behind their internal model PHIL, is drawn directly from this book. David calls it, on air, "a source for all of our Google episodes."
It surfaces at least four more times in Alphabet Inc.: Steven Levy's description of Wall Street's reaction to Google's 2005 earnings as a drunken juggler tossing too many balls in the air; Levy's account of interviewing Bill Gates at Newsweek's New York office shortly after Gmail launched, where Gates found the idea of giving away that much server storage almost offensive, calling it "morally repugnant"; Eric Schmidt's line about not wanting to "moon the giant" in 2001 by building a Google browser to challenge Microsoft; and Schmidt's description of the former Firefox engineers sitting, half-dormant, inside Sundar Pichai's client-software group.