I noticed at lunch that they had cleared out the tables outside, and put up a big tent in the courtyard. Then, in the afternoon, I saw an odd site - dozens of people carrying pizzas along the path from the parking lot. My co-worker counted 40 people, each with about 6 pizzas - and that was just the first wave. Like a train of ants in reverse, they went back and forth, bringing a thousand pizzas.

After seeing a few Googlers enter the tent and come back with a pizza in hand, our curiousity was whetted, and a few of us headed down there. It was pitched as a thanks to Google, but it seems to be some kind of publicity stunt by a small Web 2.0 startup called Cambrian House. They handed me this letter, and filmed me saying "Thanks, Cambrian House!". Here is their page about the stunt, including a somewhat amusing video, which attempts to use Google Earth to show how high a stack of 1000 pizzas is. Except, they put spacing between the pizzas. "How high is a stack of 1000 pizzas? Well, if you put a foot between each box, the stack will be over one thousand feet high!".

I asked them what they did, and they said some buzzwords ("crowd-sourcing, it's like opensource, but with money"), and then continued with the kiss of death - "But we're still trying to figure out how to monetize it". So let me get this straight - they are still trying to figure out how to monetize their business, but they are spending their money on buying cheap pizza for employees of a company with high-quality free food?!?!

WTF? Did someone set the Wayback Machine to 1999? I'm surprised they didn't roll in on Aerons, bring a pizza oven, burn the Aerons to fuel the pizza oven, and pay for it all with stock printed freshly on-site.

Ah well, it's a publicity stunt, and it will probably work. Still, it's kind of sad that they couldn't have gotten more publicity giving the pizza to someone who needed it.