The Great Wall of Google

William Wen
8 min readNov 23, 2021

Every visitor that comes to our house is greeted with this huge Google wall when they walk into the kitchen/dining area.

It’s probably a bit overwhelming, as it is literally the lighted sign that used to hang on the side of the Google campus buildings in Kirkland. Surrounding it are framed t-shirts that I’ve collected over the years. There were so many that they were taking over my dresser!

This is a lighthearted story on how I came to be in possession of an authentic classic Google logo’ed sign, and about the t-shirts around it.

It was Tuesday, September 6, 2016, day after labor day. A pretty normal morning, where I dropped off my son at school, then arrived at the Kirkland office around 7:30am. To my surprise, there were a couple of U-Haul trucks parked on the Google campus, clustered around the SE corner of building D. This is strange… What’s going on?

Google Kirkland Campus

I park the car and head to my desk. Terrance was already there. He asks me, “did you see the email?” Believe it or not, I did not check email once over a long weekend, so no, I did not. Turns out Google has a bunch of furniture and stuff from the remodel, and an email was sent over the weekend that Googlers…

--

--

William Wen
William Wen

Written by William Wen

25 years in tech | 13 years @ Google | 9+ years Tesla Investor | www.linkedin.com/in/wil-wen | twitter.com/wilwen2

Responses (1)