Authors: Douglas Edwards
"We will buy you," was Microsoft's ploy when it came to startups that threatened them, "or we will bury you." Google was not for sale. Nor would Google be foolish enough to partner with Microsoft, exposing our technology to them in ways that would let them "harvest" it and use it against us.
†
One business-development person warned me that Microsoft's MO as a company was to get close to startups, suck them dry, and then throw them away. Microsoft was methodical about it, giving generous terms to keep the startups alive, but essentially turning them into captive research-and-development centers. Microsoft would become the startups' biggest customer and thereby drive the direction of their development, perhaps offering to provide informal technical help, which necessitated a look at the startups' proprietary code.
When Microsoft turned its gaze to us, Larry and Sergey huddled with our board of directors and determined to stay the course. There was fear, but no panic. To survive—as companies like Intuit, AOL, and Oracle had in direct competition with the Redmond giant—we needed to focus on our core strengths: search quality, a comprehensive ad network, and content targeting. And the key tactic for implementing that strategy was one we had been employing from the very beginning: hire brilliant engineers to do brilliant things.
First we needed to prevent Microsoft from luring away any of the talent we had already found. That might be difficult as stock options vested for the earliest engineers and Google grew larger and more bureaucratic. On the plus side, most engineers would not view a move to Microsoft as an improvement in management streamlining. It was Cindy who raised the question to me of how we might help engineering find more talent, perhaps in a way that would bolster our image with users as well. Ads aimed at engineers, but seen by consumers—consumers who would feel they were eavesdropping on a conversation intended for someone else. If users took joy from discovering Google on their own, such an indirect campaign would have an even deeper brand impact than one aimed directly at them. It was an inspired strategy, and I knew just the people to make it work for us.
Late in 2002, I received a poster in the mail. It was a montage of ads and PR stunts that had been put together to introduce the BMW Mini Cooper to the US market. Some of them made me laugh out loud. I dropped a note to the ad agency that had sent it, telling them we weren't in the market, but if they were ever in the Bay Area, I'd like to talk to them. Almost two years later, I convinced Larry and Sergey to put the agency, Crispin Porter+Bogusky, to work for us on my secret plan to do a consumer branding campaign in the guise of an effort to recruit engineers. I didn't tell Larry and Sergey the secret part. I just said we would hire an agency to help us find more technical talent, as they were desperate to do.
Advertising to engineers would be tricky. They don't like to be marketed to. I instructed the Crispin people not to tell anyone outside Google they were working on our behalf, and not to mention branding to anyone at Google. But I let them know I wanted a campaign to reinforce the positioning of Google as the world's best search engine because we had the best technology, created by the sharpest minds in the industry.
Crispin sent a team to spend a day interviewing senior engineers on our campus. A few weeks later, they came back with a presentation full of cutting edges and radiant brilliance.
They had realistic Google ID badges with pictures of real Google engineers on the front and coding challenges on the back to be solved and sent with résumés to our HR department. They planned to drop them in classrooms at top engineering schools.
They had a plan to get Google mentioned on
The Simpsons.
*
They had a billboard that was simply a mathematical equation followed by ".com." No logo or identification. Those who solved the equation and entered the solution as a web address would get another puzzle and ultimately a Google recruiting page.
They had a series of print ads with photos purporting to be from Google's office, where parking a car, sending a fax, or getting snacks from a vending machine required solving complex puzzles. Readers were invited to send in their solutions along with their job applications.
They had a plan to rebrand our recruiting effort as "Google labs," to emphasize we were working on much more than search, which many in our target audience considered to be an already-solved problem. To make that evident, they incorporated a handwritten "Labs" as an exponent above and to the right of our Google logo.
They proposed a "Google Labs Aptitude Test" (GLAT) to be inserted in school newspapers and magazines like
Science
and the
MIT Technology Review.
Larry and Sergey didn't hate it. In fact, they were amused. One of the few elements they nixed was a video campaign called "Watch Your Ass," which showed gritty handheld-camera footage of Google recruiters hunting down engineering talent with dart guns and nets at their workplaces. It was too dark.
"Be careful not to upset those we don't end up hiring," was the gist of the founders' feedback. "Don't insult them if they can't solve the puzzles." For the rest, they gave the okay to go ahead. I quietly rejoiced. I had sold a branding campaign from the nation's hottest ad agency to two guys who hated anything to do with marketing. It had taken four years, but I had figured out a way to work the system.
The implementation of the campaign was almost flawless. Since challenging engineers fell outside Crispin's area of expertise, two Googlers, Curtis Chen and Wei-Hwa Huang (a four-time winner of the World Puzzle Championship), came up with most of the puzzles we used. I helped a bit.
"Write a haiku describing possible methods for predicting search traffic seasonality," I suggested for one.
"This space left intentionally blank. Please fill it with something that improves on emptiness," I offered for another.
For Wei-Hwa's question about the number of different ways to color an icosahedron with one of three colors on each face, I added, "What colors would you choose?" There were also nods to Chef Charlie, "Don't be evil," and an old computer game involving twisty, turny passages that I had played as a kid.
As we rolled out new elements in the campaign over 2004, the press ate it up. NPR, ABC, CNN, the
Wall Street Journal, Sixty Minutes,
and the Associated Press gave us widespread positive coverage and extended the reach of our effort substantially. Our own engineers praised the effort as fun and Googley. We received more than four thousand job applications at the specific email address we had set up. Everything worked exactly as I had hoped except for one small glitch.
We only hired one engineer because of the ads.
We had problems tracking applicants who sent in GLAT forms on paper and no way of knowing how many people the ads inspired to apply through our normal
jobs@google
channel. The ultimate number of hires may have been substantially greater, but I didn't have data to prove it. The branding effort worked. The recruiting component didn't.
Alan Eustace, the engineering director overseeing recruitment, didn't care. He wanted to run a modified campaign the following year. Urs liked the idea as well. The new head of business operations, however, didn't see it that way. The budget had come out of her department, and she had nothing concrete to show for it. I understood why she concluded it was a "complete waste of money," but I saw it differently.
For the rest of the year I tried to find a way to put Crispin back to work on promoting our brand, but the Google world had changed again. Now HR had recruiting specialists and Jonathan's product-marketing managers owned promotion of individual products. I could advise on branding, but they were responsible for the bottom-line performance. The PMMs were shopping for ad agencies, primarily to help with international promotion, which was a weak point for Crispin. And managers in Jonathan's domain—thinking outside the box—proposed we trade user data in aggregate for agency services. The agency would get inside information on the booming search-advertising market and we would get cheap ads. Win-win.
I disliked the idea. Giving out user data to cut costs seemed like a bad trade to me. But the loudest voice against it came from Marissa. For once we were standing on the same side of the fence. We had bickered in the past over issues of style, but we had never disagreed that our relationship with users was sacrosanct. Nothing should jeopardize their trust in us. Google's growth had brought in a new wave of managers, who were not "the bozos" Eric Schmidt had feared, but neither were they grounded in our core values. The PMs were impressed by the big international agencies that came wearing suits and bearing lofty titles. I wasn't. Crispin did some test campaigns for us, but their lack of global capabilities kept them out of the running. They moved on.
*
So did I.
W
E FIND OURSELVES
today at the forefront of tremendous opportunity and worldwide attention," Sergey announced in October 2003. "This is, of course, an enviable position, yet it comes with substantial costs and risks."
Sergey wanted us to know that he understood how overwhelmed we might be feeling by the demands and issues coming at us from all angles. He didn't want us to become reactive and lose our ability to maintain the edge that had brought us so far. Prioritize, he instructed us. Don't let projects linger. Say no clearly when the answer is no. Don't create needless work for others or send emails that aren't worth reading. And he urged us to take care of our health and our families. Google, he assured us, wanted us to be productive
and
happy.
I was pretty happy at the end of November when my newly split shares fully vested. They were mine, though I couldn't do anything but admire their number in our online accounting system. Oh man. How incredibly liberating. I had no intention of leaving Google, but knowing that if I did leave I'd still fully benefit from an IPO eased some of the pressure I had been feeling. It put a spring in my step as I took my daily walk around the park.
"If the stock goes to thirty dollars," I mused, "I'll be worth
X.
If it goes to fifty, I'll be worth
Y.
Could it really go to fifty? What's Yahoo at? Ohmigod. What if it went to a hundred dollars a share? Nah. That could never happen." It was a fun game to play. I tried to wipe the goofy smile off my face by the time I got back to the office, but sometimes it would reappear of its own accord.
The office changed, too. We had completed our purchase of SGI's corporate headquarters in July 2003. In January 2004, it was corporate marketing's turn to follow engineering to our new home. I packed up my boxes on Friday and on Monday went to work in building 41. Not 42, which was where engineering lived, but next door and accessible by a series of elevated bridges and walkways that would have made a giant hamster feel right at home.
There weren't many corporate marketing folks left to move. Jonathan's product-management division had absorbed our internationalization group and our market researcher. I still managed Allegra, who was now our special events coordinator, and Dylan Casey, a marketing coordinator whose previous job had been cycling with Lance Armstrong on the US Postal Service racing team.
David Krane's PR group had grown considerably, with representatives in Google offices around the world, and Karen White, the webmaster, now had a much larger staff as well. I didn't mind that the branding group had not kept pace. Managing people always felt harder to me than doing the work myself. I liked sitting in my darkened office with headphones on, thinking about our brand and how to make it shine. I also knew that at the rate the product-management team was adding PMMs—marketing managers who worked with the product team much as I had—my fate would be either induction into the collective or elimination as a redundancy. Organizations grow. They change. I didn't worry too much about it. I loved my job, but I had stock options and they were fully vested.
We had come a long way from our cramped quarters in the original Googleplex, with its cereal bins relabeled to read "Larry-O's," "Raisin Brin," and "porn Flakes," its intimate café with an unused cash register, and its walk-in-closet gym.
Our new facility had everything. There was a "Welcome home" pillow on my chair when I came in. We had a sand volleyball court, a bocce ball area, clean locker rooms, and an enormous café that doubled as our TGIF meeting space and included an upstairs balcony and an outdoor barbeque patio. There were a garden plot and an adjacent grassy field for Frisbee or soccer. There was even a mystery floor with a canted roof and oddly shaped windows creating a visual effect that nauseated the legal department staffers housed there. They quickly set up a portable bar and scheduled regular cocktail hours to ameliorate the effects.
There were snack rooms on every floor, foosball, Ping-Pong, and video games. Googlers brought in caged birds, threw camouflage netting over their cubes, and installed a traditional red British telephone booth purchased on eBay. We had massage chairs, massage rooms, and Japanese toilets featuring heated seats, "front cleansing," and built-in dryers. We had a stable housing a fleet of Segways and a video display Amit Patel created to show a spinning Earth with sample queries floating up from it in real time—each color-coded by language. And we had an enormous whiteboard on which any passing Googler could update "Google's secret plan" for taking over the world. It was filled with rumors, fake products, cartoons, and puns. Reporters sometimes asked if it was for real.