Contextlogic Inc (WISH)

[Norton1973]

In 2004, just before he graduated at 23, ­Szulczewski ($WISH founder) ,started a four-month internship at 'Google,' which then had less than 1,000 employees and was gearing up for its IPO. He lived in a three-bedroom house in Palo Alto with three other interns, churning out [Code by day] and pumping iron at night. “You always got the sense that he didn’t have time for, you know, messing around,” says former Googler Brian Singerman, now a partner at the venture firm Founders Fund and an investor in Wish. Once he became a full-time Google employee, Szulczewski wrote the prototype algorithms for keyword expansion, a feature Google sold to early advertisers to help them expand the number of search terms they could show their ads against. A company selling running shoes, for instance, might forget to ask Google to target searches for “sneakers,” but Szulczewski’s code silently added those keywords so they didn’t have to. Advertisers spent more, and the feature added roughly $100 million to Google’s annual revenue, Szulczewski claims.