Authors: Douglas Edwards
"My mind is money," Larry once explained to Charlie, pointing to a bottle, "and that kills the brain."
"I think he could spare a few brain cells," Charlie told me later.
Other members of the executive staff more willingly sacrificed bits of gray matter, and Charlie made sure their rooms were stocked with their favorite indulgences in case they didn't make it to the party down in the Den.
"It's always cool to see people let loose and have a good time," Charlie observed, confirming the opportunities for staff bonding. "Googlers really let go in ways you wouldn't have seen otherwise." He may have had in mind the toga-wearing ops guys who were only too willing to prove they were unburdened by underwear. Or maybe the sales rep who jumped on the back of another Googler, pulled off her shirt, and began whipping him with it jockey style. Or perhaps the senior manager seen crawling on all fours in the hallway, barking like an inebriated hound.
There was a pajama party with costume prizes. Larry won a bet with Sergey, Salar, and engineer Lori Park that ended with the losers jumping into an icy Lake Tahoe after dinner.
"We tried to re-create Google's 'un-corporation' attitude," Charlie explained to me, "a kind of 'fuck you' to the man, the way Google was saying that same thing to the tech industry as a whole."
Some people who visited Charlie's Den never left, crashing on the floor for the night, though that carried risks of its own, since passing out left one vulnerable to the sophomoric pranks of those still sober enough to stand. Others couldn't remember where they had fallen: one engineer woke up without his clothes and eventually discovered he'd left them at the hot tub. He sheepishly reclaimed them from the front desk. All night long, white-terry-robed figures circulated from room to room, then down to the bar or out to the boulder-shrouded spa, in Lupercalian celebration of the season.
As the company grew in size, more non-engineers participated. Many were female. The Google ski trip came to be known as a great party to crash, with live dance music from bands like the Fabulous Thunderbirds, ample alcohol, and lots of young, unattached people looking to undo the stress of Silicon Valley lives. Uninvited guests were legion.
I uninvited myself after my first trip, and found myself working uninterrupted in the Plex as phones went unanswered all around me. I walked interview candidates down empty hallways and ate pizza I ordered in for the few of us still around. Ski week became my time to clear my inbox and catch up on lagging projects.
By 2007 the size of the company made the annual ski trip impossible, and Google ended it in favor of smaller outings to more family-friendly locales like Disneyland. That was probably a good thing, though I'll always cherish the scars I earned at broomball
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and the camaraderie of shared experiences on the slopes and in the lodge. My warm feelings, however, stop at the hot tub and chats by the fireplace, and accordingly may not be as heated as those kindled by some of my friskier colleagues. You'll have to ask them about that.
"Table! Table! Table!" chanted the crowd at TGIF.
At the front of the room, Omid Kordestani, head of sales, grinned broadly, tugged at the leg of his black Armani slacks, and climbed onto a conference table while holding a microphone in one hand. The crowd erupted in cheers.
"Omid! Omid! Omid!" we chanted.
Omid was very popular at Google. He always came to TGIF prepared with a smile, a joke, and a stack of numbers that led to a very happy conclusion.
As soon as we had an OKR process in place in early 2000, Larry and Sergey gave Omid a goal: he should book half a million dollars in ad revenue by the end of the first quarter. My assumption was that Larry and Sergey wanted to make Omid spontaneously combust. It was, after all, only the first period in which our original advertising program had been active (well before AdWords had launched). Larry and Sergey didn't count toward Omid's goal any leads or promises of revenue that might not materialize; they only cared about actual dollars in the bank. Omid had fewer than a half dozen people in his entire department, and Google was unknown outside Silicon Valley. We had engineering issues and incomplete tools and flaky infrastructure, and our competition was cutting deals at deep discounts.
Still, Omid gave indications that the numbers looked good when he presented his updates at our weekly TGIFs. It wasn't until the end of the quarter, however, that we saw just how good-looking the numbers actually were.
Omid stood up and, with classic showman's timing, talked about the difficulty of reaching the team's aggressive goal just months after launching a new product. He showed charts with illegible footnotes and spreadsheets filled with numbers too tiny to read. With all the challenges his team faced, he told us, we had been lucky to secure any new revenue at all. Then, with a grin and a flourish, he revealed that Google had booked six hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars for the quarter. That revenue was already in-house. The sales team had secured more than a million dollars in overall revenue commitments, putting the company on track for a great second quarter as well. The applause was instantaneous and prolonged. Our salespeople, I thought, were amazing.
Three months later, Omid and his team beat their goal again.
The third time around, we started calling Omid a "sandbagger." Sergey mockingly accused him of underestimating what his team could achieve, even though his goal had increased by leaps and bounds each quarter. Omid feigned shock and denied any culpability. We all took up the charge, though some new employees didn't understand why we were harassing the person who had given us such great news. It became a TGIF tradition. In Omid's absence one week, Sergey gave the sales report. He pretended to look over Omid's spreadsheets and materials carefully.
"Let me summarize," he said at last, looking over toward the sales team, imitating Omid. "We're sandbagging." The room cracked up.
The table had its own back story.
When our weekly meeting outgrew the hallway outside Larry and Sergey's office, we relocated to Charlie's café downstairs. The café's acoustics made it hard to hear, so for his presentation, Omid climbed on a chair, then stepped up onto a long lunch table. He had just concluded his remarks when the table gave way. There was a loud crash as the metal legs spontaneously folded and an involuntary "Ohhhhh!" from the crowd as Omid found himself momentarily standing on air. With surprising agility, he executed an acrobatic twist and landed squarely on the toes of his black Italian shoes. The room erupted with applause.
"And he nails the dismount!" I shouted.
After that, chants of "Table! Table!" greeted Omid at every TGIF, and he gamely obliged. Eventually someone placed a burlap bag filled with sand on top of the table, and Omid, impeccably attired, planted his loafers firmly upon it to let us know that yes, despite the overwhelming odds, his heroic sales team had again delivered a record-breaking quarter. For Google's shareholder employees, the story never got old in the telling.
Because Google was so forthcoming with its financial information, not only at TGIF but also on MOMA (the intranet), there was never an inflection point at which we suddenly discovered we possessed wealth beyond our wildest dreams. Anyone could check the revenue and expense figures and do a few projections. One day I calculated our approximate earnings-per-share ratio, then used Yahoo's current multiple to determine what a reasonable stock price might be if the company were being publicly traded. Then I multiplied the number of shares I held by that value.
"It's not real money," I repeated to myself. "It's not real money." We had no CEO. We had no CFO. No one was making plans to go public. I went back to work, but I hummed a happy tune as I did so.
"Schwim? You have a question?" Sergey asked, knowing full well what the question would be.
"Yes," said Schwim, standing up at the front of the TGIF meeting in February 2001. The Nooglers had been introduced. Larry and Sergey had reviewed the news of the week. Omid had completed his slide show. Now it was time for Q and A.
"What's the status of the CEO search?" Schwim wanted to know. It was the same question he asked every week. We all were aware there was a checklist of items to be completed before the company could go public and our stock options would have real value. A CEO was on the list. Also a Chief Financial Officer.
Sergey paused for dramatic effect. "We're making progress," he said with a serious look. It was the same answer he gave every week.
When I joined in 1999, many of us assumed that Google would be public within a year. We weren't obsessed with the idea of an IPO, but it was the height of the dot-com era, and that's what startups did after they'd been around for six months. Larry and Sergey didn't seem in any hurry. They felt no urgency to hire a CEO despite the board's prodding. Sometimes they would make a dismissive remark about a candidate they had interviewed. They didn't give names, just vague disqualifications based on a lack of tech savvy or "Googleyness."
At TGIF on March 23, 2001, Larry and Sergey introduced two Nooglers to the assembled staff: Dirk Aguilar as an international advertising analyst and Eric Schmidt as chairman of Google's board of directors. It was assumed that Eric would be made Google's CEO as soon as he could disentangle himself from his responsibilities as CEO of Novell. I was thrilled, not because I knew Eric and felt he would lead us to search dominance, but because the long wait was finally over. That light we could see at the end of the tunnel was Google's ticker symbol circling the NASDAQ sign in Times Square.
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When I learned that Google had hired a "corporate" CEO, I allowed myself a glimmer of hope. Surely someone who had worked for large, competitive companies like Novell and Sun Microsystems would get the importance of strong marketing. Maybe he would see branding as a powerful tool for claiming market share. Maybe he would want to tell the Google story in new and creative ways around the world. Maybe he would feed Cindy's anemic staff, build my spindly budget, and transform our ninety-seven-pound department into a five-hundred-pound gorilla. Maybe he would cure lepers and help the blind to see. Who knew? I did. Larry and Sergey would never hire someone like that.
"I don't believe in trade shows," Eric informed Cindy and me at a get-acquainted meeting he set up shortly after coming onboard. There was a new sheriff in town and our days of profligate spending and freewheeling excess had ended. Eric's ideas about marketing mirrored those of our founders, only with a paranoid edge sharpened by experience.
"I've seen how the budgets for industry shows grow and grow," Eric regaled us, "until they're so bloated you're paying for warehouses full of booths and furniture and trucks to haul them around. We're not going to do that."
"We're not going to spend money on mass-media marketing," he continued. "No TV spots or big magazine spreads. And everything you buy needs to be on a purchase order signed off by me personally."
I sat back, stunned by the implication that we were an overweight cost center that needed to be taught self-discipline. We had never done a trade show. We had one booth—a crappy pop-up frame that traveled around in a tube with pictures we stuck on using Velcro. We hadn't done any mass-market advertising, other than banner trades and our buy on Yahoo. Eric obviously didn't know anything about our marketing department, but had come in swinging his big stick to knock us down to size. Stunned, I was, but not surprised. As our new CEO, Eric wanted to control costs and to lay down the law his first day in Dodge. And I also wasn't surprised that Larry and Sergey hadn't bothered telling him our marketing group wasn't like others he might have worked with, or, if they had, that he hadn't believed them.
We nodded our heads and interjected where we could, muttering amens and hosannas when he let us. He seemed to hear some of it. When we let him know that Google t-shirts were our biggest expense, he smiled approvingly.
"That's fine. Keep doing that. If someone likes our product enough to want to wear our brand, we should do everything we can to make it possible. And it's great for staff morale to have everyone decked out in the company logo." He would soon be signing off on expenditures for preshrunk cotton in the seven-figure range.
Cindy and I agreed we needed to bring Eric up to speed. I drafted a memo laying out our brand strategy and listing our guiding principles:
I dropped the memo into Eric's inbox and copied Larry and Sergey. The response was deafening, as in, I must have gone deaf because I didn't hear anything. I took that as a good sign. We received no more unsolicited feedback from Eric on how to spend our budget. Apparently he realized that we were doing the right thing. Or, more likely, he figured that if we screwed up, our impact on the company's overall health would amount to little more than a sneeze. Or maybe he was just focused on our number one priority: finding women.
"Larry and Sergey did research," HR senior manager Stacy Sullivan told me, "and they believed that having a good gender mix created a healthier work environment. For the few women that you had, [hiring more women] made their lives so much better. They had a community."