You know when someone says “i liked that band before they got big?” That’s the story behind this shirt – one of my early projects at Google was in monetizing parked page traffic with our AdSense for Domains product (i.e. domains which are owned but don’t contain lots of content, just contextual ads).

Nowadays people understand just how profitable this business can be – in fact substantial venture and private equity money has been invested. But back in my day it was still this weird little corner of the internet where entrepreneurial folks were building large empires worth tens of millions of dollars.

From Google’s May 2007 Developer Day. I spoke about the upcoming changes to the YouTube APIs.

One thing does bug me a bit about the shirt – the blue block seems like an outsider ready to get hit by a hammer as in “raised nails get pounded down” in support of conformity.

2006 Summer Picnic they switched it up on us – no more hats or visors. Instead a lined fleece blanket which folded into its own little pouch.

A light green fleece jacket with subtle google logo = awesome. Getting it at an event in the middle of 90 degree NYC July weather? Weird.

We gave out these jackets to a bunch of notable CMOs who attended an event in New York summer of 06. I attended to discuss online video. Stayed on the east coast for a wedding, passing up a ride on the Google plane back to MV.

Normally with tech when you hear “grease monkey” you think Firefox extension. But in this case it was the Google Demo Garage at the 2007 Zeitgeist conference. Various product managers demo’ed their stuff to our VIP crowd. We were issued Google Mechanic shirts to pair with our garage motif.

During the 5.6 quake a few weeks back I almost made a grab for my Google-issued Earthquake Survival pack containing medical supplies, three days worth of food and water, etc.

Another Google hat – this one for the colder weather. I believe it came from one of our company ski trips.

Resuming the Google Gear series (although i’ve been really bad about getting new stuff since moving over to YouTube). I think this visor was from Summer 05 picnic. Available in your standard Google colors.