It's also worth noting that Paul Buchheit worked at Intel before Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit and I remember him railing about big companies and the sort of sclerotic bureaucracy that prevailed at big companies.

I think Paul also wanted to pick an idea that would prevent Google from becoming a typical big company. But I don't recall there ever being any sort of "Google's strategy leans it toward evil; we need to avoid that" undertone in Paul's suggestion. In my mind, it was more like "avoid how almost all larger companies naturally end up being."