Employees drag around exercise balls and use them to sit for impromptu meetings. If they want, workers jump on electric scooters to move between meetings. A specially wired office chair in a spare room is programmed with a bootleg copy of PlayStation2, not yet commercially available in the United States. This is a great investment. It takes a lot to keep good people in Silicon Valley.
Nobody fills out forms in triplicate.
The women started on a Friday, spent much of the weekend working, and by 7 p.m. Wednesday, the jazzed-up search function went live. A native of Fort Atkinson, Wis., who has a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Karrels had internships at Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago, IBM in New York and Silicon Graphics Inc. here. Ultimately, he went to Google. Intuitively, it makes you feel like you have a vested interest. Nurturing a start-up environment is also on the radar screen for larger companies such as Autodesk Inc. of San Rafael, with 4 million customers in more than 150 countries.