A Truck Full of Money Read Online Free

jewels. Here, there were no Keep Out signs on outer doors, no cameras patrolling the interior, no identity cards for employees to show to a scanner, and, for visitors, no nondisclosure forms to sign, not even a sign-in sheet.
    Paul remembered the time when a young woman came to the front door and asked him for a job. She said she worked next door and through the walls it sounded as if a job at Kayak would be a lot more fun than hers. In fact, the atmosphere was congenial. There were parties, and members of Paul’s team shared lunch and took breaks to chat with each other in the kitchen. Occasionally they called to each other from their desks. You didn’t sense seething animosities. If any existed, they were subtle. Otherwise, Paul would have rid the office of them. He liked it that some of his team were boisterous extroverts. A few were given to practical jokes—wiring up a ballpoint pen so that it would shock anyone who tried to use it, and other proofs that some minds can race ahead without leaving middle school behind. But during most of the working day, when you looked across the sea of desks, what you usually saw were faces staring at computer screens.
    These two rooms in Concord were Kayak’s central factory, indeed most of what there was to the factory of a company that had just been sold for nearly two billion dollars. For many of an older generation, a sum like that evoked images of a vastly different industrial America, of factories like fortresses, of blast furnaces and vats of molten steel, of workmen with bulging forearms carrying lunch pails. Paul and some of his team were the children of such men, but for this generation, coffee break meant espresso.
    Concord belonged to what was now a mighty segment of new American industry, mighty and yet utterly unmuscular-looking. A stranger walking into this office—a stranger who, like most of humanity, knew little about software—would have had to wonder what these eccentric-looking kids could possibly be doing to generate any money at all, let alone a fortune. Not for the stranger but for his team, Paul had tried to offer an answer. Programmers are always in danger of becoming happily abstracted from the consequences of their work. Paul had arranged to show his crew the fruits of their labor, a representation of their product’s achievement—a representation in numbers, an abstraction itself.
    A screen hung on each of the far walls of the second floor. One screen was large, big enough for an art house cinema. If you had looked up from your desk—say at 3:32 on the afternoon of November 7, 2012, the day before Kayak’s sale was announced—you would have seen, in bold type at the center of either screen, this number:
2,737,926
    Digits changed at stopwatch speed. Two seconds later the display read:
2,738,816
    No explanation was provided, but everyone who worked here knew that this number represented the day’s running tally of travel searches. The searches, that is, that visitors made between one midnight and the next on the Kayak website and the Kayak mobile application.
    The display was old news now. You rarely saw anyone stop and stare at it, but seen afresh, it was mesmerizing. Mesmerizing just to watch the number grow, like fractions of seconds flying past—by midnight it would reach at least five million, and more than that during times of holiday travel. Paul had meant the number on display as a message to his team, his way of saying to them, “Good job. Let’s do more.” And it was also one of his ways of trying to put them in vicarious touch with customers. If you knew that the number at the center of the screen signified searches, it was bound to dawn on you that watching the digits grow was the same as watching millions of people typing at computers and swiping fingers over the screens of smartphones and electronic notepads as they brought up the Kayak website on their browsers and began to look for information about flights, hotels, rental cars.