Authors: Douglas Edwards
In 1997, they changed the name to Google, which played to their love of math and scale (a googol is 10
100
). They chose the variant spelling for two reasons: the
googol.com
web domain was taken, and Larry thought they wouldn't be able to trademark a number. Larry was a very shrewd businessman—but we'll get to that.
Within a year, Larry and Sergey had taken leave from Stanford and set up in the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, the college roommate of Sergey's girlfriend. Google's traffic began climbing and the company began hiring. They incorporated in September 1998, and when they outgrew Susan's garage in early 1999, they moved to an office at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. Six months later, having talked two venture capital firms out of $25 million, they moved into an industrial park at 2400 Bayshore Parkway in Mountain View. That's where I joined the company, which at the time had about fifty employees and was doing almost seven million searches a day. Even though that was a seventy thousand percent increase over the year before, it barely registered as a blip on the radar of major players like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, which were each delivering on the order of half a billion page views per day.
Yahoo was the Jabba the Hutt of the "search space" at the turn of the millennium, and it wasn't even a search engine. Yahoo was a "portal," a provider of mail and news and all kinds of services built around a hand-compiled directory of web pages arranged by categories. It had almost thirty million users, but it rented technology to power its search box from Inktomi, the leading provider of search to websites and corporate intranets.
Industry experts speculated, Would Google focus on growing its own site to compete with Yahoo, or would it become a technology supplier and compete with Inktomi? If we tried to do both—build a popular online search engine while providing search technology to other sites that hoped to do the same thing—we would end up competing with our customers. The question, however, betrayed ignorance of Larry and Sergey's aspirations and self-confidence. Why choose just to have cake when you could eat it too? Google would be both a supplier and a search site, because Larry and Sergey knew they were smart enough to isolate the part of the equation containing failure and work around it.
Their vision didn't end at winning the search wars. They would build a company to fix large-scale problems affecting millions of people and terraform the entire landscape of human knowledge. They would speed medical breakthroughs, accelerate the exploration of space, break down language barriers. Instead of putting a Band-Aid on global ignorance and confusion, they would clear the clogged arteries of the world's data systems and move information effortlessly to the point at which it was needed at exactly the time it was required. They would be, Larry believed, an information conglomerate on the scale of General Electric—the GE of IT. To do that, they would need better tools—starting with a search engine that actually delivered what people wanted to find.
Engineers rebel at inefficiency. Larry Page, more than anyone I ever met, hated systems that ate hours and produced suboptimal results. His burning passion was to help the world stop wasting his time.
That love of efficiency begat a fondness for frugality, because paying more than the bare minimum for something was by definition wasteful. Larry liked trimming unnecessary expenses, but it was Sergey who fully applied his razor-sharp intellect to cutting costs.
"That seems kind of expensive," Sergey said, looking at the hundred-dollar price for a cab from Malpensa airport to downtown Milan in January 2003. He, his girlfriend, and I had flown in for the opening of our new Italian office, and I was looking forward to traveling in style with the president of a booming Internet company. The dot-com era was over for everyone else, but Google's financials were deep in the black. Even though we'd flown coach, surely now we'd be kicking loose a little change to let the Old World know we had indeed arrived.
"Maybe we should take the bus," Sergey suggested, standing in the middle of the baggage claim area squinting at the signage. "It's less than five Euros a person." The bus? What? Were we college kids backpacking on spring break? Maybe we could just hitchhike into town. It was pouring out, and a cab would take us right to our door, not to some run-down depot a short walk from nowhere.
We compromised on the train, which ended up saving us fifty dollars, not counting the cost to my inflated sense of importance.
Efficiency. Frugality. And oh yes, integrity.
Larry and Sergey had an intuitive feel for presenting data in a way that improved the ratio of signal to noise. That means they didn't believe in adding unnecessary crap to the information you actually wanted to see. So, no blinking banner ads in Google search results. No links to every service Google offered pasted all over the
Google.com
homepage. And no intermingling of ads with actual search results as our competitor
GoTo.com
was doing. To corrupt a working system would be to profane perfection.
"We could try a loyalty program," I once suggested in a meeting about getting users to search more often, "like a frequent flyer program."
Larry raised his eyebrows the way he does when he considers an idea so blatantly ridiculous you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking it.
"Frequent flyer programs are evil," he said.
"They are?" I didn't recall my Mileage Plus number ending in 666.
"They incentivize people to take flights that are not the most direct or the cheapest, just so they can earn points. Their employers end up paying more, and people lose time traveling."
Loyalty programs promoted loyalty above efficiency, and that was just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Efficiency, Frugality, Integrity. I suppose if you had stitched that onto a flag, most Googlers would have saluted. There were other operating principles I unearthed picking my way along through trial and error, but those three constitute the mother lode from which they were mined.
And while we're in the mines, let's explore exactly what my fifty-plus honest Google colleagues were toiling to accomplish so cheaply and efficiently.
I was Google employee number fifty-nine, as near as I can tell, but I started the same week as other people, so my number might have been higher or lower. It doesn't matter. We each contributed according to our ability to improve information access for the betterment of all mankind. That the lowliest engineer's capacity exceeded mine by a bazillion percent made no difference in our status-blind environment.
Theoretically.
In reality, if you weren't an engineer, your first directive was to avoid impeding the progress of those who were. I'm not a technical guy. No one at Google ever said, "Hey, let's ask Doug!" when the flux capacitor hiccupped. But you couldn't work at Google without learning something new every day, even if you weren't trying to. Most engineers opened up about their work when I sat next to them at lunch, and generally they didn't mind using little baby-English words to explain things to me. Given the pressure, though, the engineers were biased toward being productive rather than talking about their productivity. It was a "Don't talk. Do." kind of culture, which made communication about our technical achievements erratic.
For example, I ran our weekly TGIF meeting for a while. TGIF was an all-company affair at which Larry and Sergey recounted the wins of the previous week as we sipped beer and chewed food on skewers. The engineers were so reluctant to report what they had done that Sergey got annoyed because he ran out of things to talk about.
"You must have at least three hundred people," he said to an engineering manager one Friday. "So over the course of a week, that makes six man-years. If this were the list of my accomplishments after six years of work, I would be pretty embarrassed."
Communication issues appear as a recurring motif in the pages to come: issues between engineering and marketing and issues between Larry and Sergey and everyone else. You'll recognize them when you see them.
So there you have it: the overview I
didn't
have that would have helped me understand something, at least, about the challenges that lay ahead for Google and for me. I still wouldn't have known our business strategy or how we would pay for all the engineers and hardware we needed. I still wouldn't have been prepared for Google's idiosyncratic rules of management, the atmosphere of constant pressure, or the environment that incubated extremism. But at least I'd have recognized which laws of physics applied—most of the time.
You're now better prepared than I was to undertake the Google adventure, which began for me in late 1999, a year after I crossed into my forties. I was due for a mid-life crisis, but what I got was a rebirth.
Chapter 1I did things my way.
It was not the Google way.
One of us would change.
I
WAS NOT A
young Turk. I was not a hotshot bred-for-success type who blew through business school, swung a gig at a consulting firm, and then leapt into a great management slot at a groundbreaking new tech company just as it went platinum. I had no desire to be that guy. You can tell, because I majored in English. I drifted through college without set plans for life after graduation and ended up in a series of short-term marketing roles until 1992, when I landed at the
San Jose Mercury News
(a.k.a. "The
Merc
"). I was thirty-four years old and ready to settle into something with a tinge of permanence.
"There's another baby on the way," my wife, Kristen, reminded me, "and he's going to need new shoes."
Seven years went by. It was 1999 and I was now forty-one. I had a steady paycheck and a third child, and I was set for life in a big, rock-solid company with a 150-year history and a handle on the future—but instead of hunkering down, I quit my job to join a startup with no revenue and no discernible business plan. What was I thinking? Why would I volunteer to take a twenty-five-thousand-dollar salary cut and a less impressive title to be with a bunch of college kids playacting at creating a company?
It seemed logical at the time, but only because logic at the time was warped and twisted by the expanding dot-com bubble.
Managing marketing and then online product development at the
Merc
("The Newspaper of Silicon Valley") had given me a great view of the Internet explosion taking place outside our walls. Jerry Ceppos, the paper's executive editor, called it "the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance, happening right in our backyard." The region was rife with emerging e-Medicis and dot-Botticellis crafting new businesses from nothing but bits and big ideas. The
Merc
wanted desperately to join them and so launched a raft of new-media initiatives, including a tech news hub called
Siliconvalley.com
for which I'd written the business plan. I envisioned
SV.com
as a vibrant community center for anyone whose life was touched by technology. Yet, despite our air of optimism, I couldn't help but notice a spreading stench of tar pit–scented doom.
Over its century and a half, the
Mercury News
had layered on coat after coat of process, until whatever entrepreneurial spirit remained was obscured beneath the corporate craquelure of org charts and policy manuals. We saw newspapers as the first draft of history, and no one wanted to make missteps transitioning the historical record to the next mass medium. Every loose end and every blurry projection needed to be carefully wrapped up before our new product could be thrown onto the public's porch.
We did manage to launch a
Siliconvalley.com
store stocked with logo items from well-known tech companies like Dell, HP, and NetObjects. Our supplier asked if, as a favor to him, we'd also include a smaller firm from his client list.
"This Google," I asked him, "what do they make?"
"Internet search," he said.
"Search? Ha. Good luck with that," I thought, and immediately lost interest in them.
I grew tired of the struggles that went with dragging an old business into a new age. I wanted a fresh start. I wanted to get closer to the real Internet; close enough to grab the cable and feel the hum of millions of people communicating within the global hive. Worst-case scenario? I'd get in, build my high-tech chops, and get out. Perhaps I'd return like the prodigal son. It was 1999. It wasn't as if mainstream media were going away anytime soon.
*
I scoured the tech press for leads on the next Yahoo, a business I had shortsightedly predicted would be a flash in the pan. Yahoo had shown a willingness to hire talent from the
Mercury News,
but by the time I grudgingly decided they might be on to something, they no longer needed my validation or my résumé. Even with former colleagues interceding, it took me weeks to get the attention of a Yahoo recruiter.
"Are we more like Macy's or Wal-Mart as a brand?" the hiring manager asked me over the phone. "What Yahoo services do you use? How could they be improved?"
He liked my answers well enough to call me in for face-to-face questioning that very afternoon. A large Plexiglas cow stood patiently in Yahoo's lobby, surrounded by big overstuffed purple furniture that looked as if it had been appropriated from
Pee-wee's Playhouse.
A t-shirted drone showed me to a windowless white room, where for the next three hours a series of marketing staffers jabbed at me with pointed questions. I kept my energy high and my answers short as my interrogators flitted from topic to topic and then flew off to more important meetings.