On September 8, 2013—a little less than nine months after the January board meeting—Larry Page posted a statement on his blog: “I’m excited to announce Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases. Art Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer.”
The moment the blog hit the wires, press, pundits, geeks, researchers, venture capitalists—everyone in Silicon Valley—jumped as if they had been shocked with a cattle prod. Phones and emails started lunging around the Valley like great, arcing live wires ripped from the moorings of the main line. Here was one of Silicon Valley’s grand pillars of entrepreneurial achievement, and Arthur Levinson, a bona fide Silicon Valley heavyweight, joining forces to run this crazy new operation funded with bushels of Googlebucks. The combination of the two immediately and fundamentally changed the entire landscape of longevity research.
The word on the grapevine was that Page and his colleagues would be writing many checks—upwards of one billion dollars—focused exclusively on annihilating aging. One rumor had it that when Levinson asked Larry Page how much money Google could ante up, Page simply said, “I’ll let you know when we run out.”
Though no one outside the inner circle knew it at the time, the initial, ground-floor investment from Google was $250 million. That was the money provided to get the operation on its feet; another $500 million was in the hopper when needed. That was half the money. The other half was coming from the pharmaceutical partner that Levinson had argued at the January board meeting would be so important to the Calico fold: AbbVie, a huge firm that already employed 28,000 people and delivered drugs to 170 different countries. That deal wouldn’t be consummated until the fall of 2014, but when it was, AbbVie would kick in up to $250 million more, with another $500 million to come. If Calico could prove its solutions looked reasonably safe and workable, AbbVie would have the option to take the drugs into late-stage FDA trials, and then all the way to market. Still more money for that would come later. So for now, a cool $1.5 billion was guaranteed to be in the bank.
The other big shock, once the press got hold of Page’s blog, was the news that Google was getting directly into the health care business. At the time, this surprised those who populated the Valley. After all, wasn’t Google a software company that made search engines and such? The very name was synonymous with computing. But Page wanted to assure everyone that computing was beginning to touch all sectors of life, and that included ending aging and death—even if, in Page’s words, it appeared “strange or speculative compared with our existing internet businesses.”
Barely a few heartbeats after Page’s blog posted, Time magazine dispatched journalists Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman to get on the job. “Google vs. Death”—what a story! Except there wasn’t much about Google or death in the article. Instead, the piece mostly focused on explaining Google’s moonshots. There was something to be said for moonshots—not so much because Calico, itself, could somehow guarantee longer life, but because Google had decided to back the company in the first place. And who could deny that it was a big deal? That was the underlying, vibrating, unconscious appeal of Calico—Google, Page, Levinson, a billion and a half dollars, life and death.
It was now clear, the best and brightest in the Valley were coming, armed with trainloads of cash tackling the one thing no one in the Valley had yet figured out how to manufacture: time. Hadn’t they all recently seen Steve Jobs, supreme scion of the Valley, brought low, just like every other mortal? The man who appeared indomitable, who had said our goal should be to “put a dent in the universe,” who had famously written, “Here’s to the crazy ones”—hadn’t even he succumbed, relegated in his last moments to a single, all-encompassing, but inscrutable word, “Wow!”10
Yes, death was the great equalizer, but who wanted to be equal? Who wanted to simply pass away, be left behind? Dying was more than sad; it was an unequivocal cosmic slap-down! A booming message that said who was really in charge, and what really mattered. And it was not the human race—not even Silicon Valley’s anointed, wealthy, driven, and brilliant specimens. It was Death.
But, now, maybe there was hope: for baby boomers, Silicon Valley’s denizens, and all those afterward who didn’t want to die. Maybe, at last, the human race was rising up. A cage match! The brightest, smartest, and richest facing off with the ultimate serial killer. No more tricks or miracle cures, or declamations and ruminations full of sound and fury signifying, in the end…nothing. No, now the human race had its A-Team on the case and woe betide the avenging angel, death’s nemesis. In effect, Google and Larry Page were out–Silicon Valleying Silicon Valley. Others along the Peninsula might say, “Hey we unveiled a new phone or iPad or car last week. What are you up to?”
“Us? Oh, we killed death.”