Who was the first employee hired by Google?

Google’s first employee was Craig Silverstein.

Silverstein was a software engineer who had studied for a PhD at Stanford University alongside Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He joined them during Google’s early development and became the company’s first employee, helping turn the experimental search project into a functioning business. His early work included contributions to Google’s search technology and infrastructure.

Before joining Google, Silverstein had graduated from Harvard University and had already distinguished himself as a programmer. In 1993, he was part of Harvard’s team that won the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. At Google, he later served as director of technology and remained with the company through its first major period of growth.

Silverstein left Google in February 2012 to join Khan Academy. The other names in the options were prominent Google engineers or executives, but they were not the company’s first hire. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat became especially influential for Google’s distributed-systems infrastructure, while Marissa Mayer was an early executive and product leader.