Authors: Douglas Edwards
"You did a great job," he wrote. Your changes were all well written, thoughtful, and you defended them based on your understanding of Google, the founders, and the history of how we've handled prose for the last five years. There is no one in the company who could have been more effective. You came through in a big way last night for the cause." He copied the message to the entire executive team.
Suddenly I felt bad about the whole carwash thing.
"Please come to a company meeting today at 11:30 in the TGIF area," said the email that went out to all Googlers on Thursday, April 29, at eleven a.m. "Full-time employees only, please. Be prepared to show your ID badges."
The TGIF area was Charlie's Café. By the time I arrived at eleven-fifteen, the building was packed. Every Googler I'd ever seen, and many I'd never met, either sat in the rows of folding chairs or leaned over the balcony railing.
At the front of the room, four microphone stands stood on the low stage, waiting, each mic covered with a windscreen in one of the Google logo colors. The mics were not the wireless ones Larry preferred, because our security manager worried that someone outside the building could pick up the signal from a wireless mic. The wall at the back was made of three-foot-wide perforated metal panels that curved in a semicircle and stretched to the ceiling. A row of potted plants marked the front of the stage, and two banners printed with enlarged Google doodle logos hung at the back. On one banner, Albert Einstein peered out of an
o.
On the other, two aliens sat on the letter
g
and looked down from the moon on a rising earth.
Craig Silverstein, Google's first employee, sat on the floor facing the stage, and an interpreter for the deaf faced the other way, signing for one of our hearing-impaired engineers.
Larry and Sergey walked in with Eric and Omid. Larry leaned against the railing as Sergey walked onstage. Sergey grinned and stepped up to the microphone with the bright green cover. He wore a black long-sleeved t-shirt and gray jeans.
"Thank you for coming," he said to the hushed assemblage. Pause. "I just wanted you to be the first to know..." Nervous giggles from the crowd. Pause. "that I just saved a fortune on my auto insurance."
*
The laughter shook the walls. We all knew why we were there. In the half hour after the note went out announcing the meeting, our press release had crossed the wire. Google was going public.
News vans were parked in a row down the street outside, microwave antennas extended, satellite dishes up, and light-diffusing scrims positioned for on-camera interviews. A helicopter buzzed overhead as security guards stood watch from the parking lot entrances.
Omid gave an encore performance of his greatest TGIF hits, with slides showing what we hadn't been allowed to see in months. Our revenue was so far up and to the right that the purple bars were pushing off the top of the screen.
Eric spoke and reminded us not to be distracted by all that was about to happen. Not to let the company's culture change, not to get caught up in the hype.
When the floor was opened for questions, Keith Kleiner, an early employee from operations, walked to the mic. "I just want to say," he began, looking at Larry and Sergey, "thank you. You guys have done an incredible job building this company." The applause burst like a thunderclap from the seats, the aisles, the balcony. Within seconds, every employee was standing and cheering. Larry put his arm around Sergey's shoulder and beamed at the crowd. Sergey reciprocated. For two minutes, waves of unadulterated appreciation rolled over the founders as Eric stood to the side and pointed like a conductor at two virtuoso violinists.
After the meeting we went back to our desks and back to work. I stayed there until after six, before packing up my laptop and heading to the Sports Page bar and grill around the corner. Affectionately known among Googlers as "The Shit Hole," it was a funky wood-and-plaster hut with a large back patio perfect for informal celebrations. Lori Park, one of the first engineers hired, had arranged to rent it out for a get-together of old-time Googlers. Salar was there, and Susan brought her kids. Bart from advertising operations and the biz dev guys who had come over from Netscape. Orkut, Ben Smith, and Ben Gomes showed up. Radhika, Ed Karrels, and Wayne. The Blogger guys. Craig and Georges. And Babette, who now supervised an army of Google massage therapists. I flashed back four years to Google in early 2000 and felt as close to my colleagues as I ever had. We had made this climb together, and for just a brief moment, we could pause and reflect on the journey that had brought us here.
I had printed out a copy of the S-1 (as had most of the company—the printers hadn't stopped all day), and I walked around with a red Sharpie, collecting signatures on it from Larry and Sergey, Craig, and our chief legal officer, David Drummond. I wanted something tangible to prove I had been there, to freeze the moment when my Silicon Valley fantasy solidified into reality.
I finished my beer and headed home.
The months that followed were not much different from the ones that had come before. The Gmail privacy issue finally settled down. Liz Figueroa abandoned her legislation. Cindy and I talked out the issues she had raised in her late-night flame mail. The tension eased, but the pressure didn't. I continued to put in long hours working on principles regarding scumware, and I fought for a Users' Bill of Rights that didn't make it past the executive committee.
We launched a corporate blog, though it was risky given that we had entered a government-mandated "quiet period" as soon as we filed our S-1 statement. We couldn't post anything that might be perceived as promoting sales of our stock in the IPO. My first post was about recruiting for our European office. My second post was an apology for editing the first post after it had already gone up. I was still learning new things, like blogger etiquette.
I kept knocking my head against the wall between corporate marketing and product management and got little more than a migraine for my efforts. I went to Marissa's weekly launch meetings but had only occasional glimpses into products that were early in development. One of those was desktop search, which now was called "Fluffy Bunnies," because its original name, "Total Recall," had been deemed too scary from a privacy standpoint. Fluffy Bunnies would index the hard drive on a personal computer and make it searchable. I argued vehemently that we needed to give users a warning up front—"This product is not like others you may have used. Please read the privacy policy carefully"—but my tone was considered too alarmist. I did convince the team to use the descriptive line "Search your own computer," though Marissa found it colloquial, redundant, and "lame, lame, lame."
The CIA bought one of our Google Search Appliances for their intranet and asked if they could customize our logo by replacing an
O
with their seal. I told our sales rep to give them the okay if they promised not to tell anyone. I didn't want it spooking privacy advocates. "Do you think they can keep a secret?" I asked her.
I hired a writer to take on some of the load—Michael Krantz, a funny, gifted journalist who had covered Silicon Valley for
Time
magazine and understood technology. He got the job because he put together a prospective April Fools' joke that made me laugh.
Having writing help freed up some of my time, giving me the opportunity to attend the series of finance fairs Jonathan had arranged for the company, with representatives from firms like Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, and UBS explaining how to invest prudently and avoid excessive taxes. Many of these advisors had been randomly dialing every phone extension at Google for months, trying to line up clients before the IPO. I had ignored the calls, but now I was curious about what the professionals had to say. The IPO was coming in August and I needed to think about what it might mean for me.
The road to the IPO was rocky. Larry and Sergey wanted to sell stock directly to the public through a Dutch auction, in which the stock price would be gradually lowered until all shares were sold. They thought that would be democratic and allow broad participation. They saw the traditional way of going public as a broken system. Wall Street investment banks insisted on pricing shares artificially low so that they popped up on the first day of trading and the banks made a killing on the shares they owned. To Larry and Sergey, it was deceptive and inefficient and only the banks benefited. They spurned the bankers and told them Google would do it differently. The bankers fought back, constantly bad-mouthing Google's stock, its management, and its idiosyncratic IPO process.
*
Estimates for the opening price of Google shares sank below the high end of one hundred twenty-five dollars because there was less demand than anticipated amid all the disparaging chatter and a sagging stock market.
Admittedly, Larry and Sergey didn't help much. The report from their road show, in which they traveled to various cities flogging our offering to institutional investors, was that they weren't taking the presentation any more seriously than they took our weekly TGIF meetings. In other words, Sergey didn't look at the slides before speaking about them, and commented that the information they contained was wrong, or not very good, or of dubious origins. The energy levels were low, the handoffs sloppy, and the attitude so laid-back as to be disrespectful.
People noticed.
BusinessWeek
reported that when Sergey was "asked about Google's strategy for growth," he said, "'If I tell you, you'll just ask again.'" The article also quoted "a different money manager with a billion-dollar Internet fund" as saying, "'They seem to think you should feel privileged [to buy Google stock]. That's the attitude—and it's a bizarre one.'"
†
The writer questioned whether Sergey had the maturity or the humility to run a major technology company and whether our founders would "be blinded by the sort of success that would go to anyone's head."
"How can I win, Doug?" Cindy, who was on tour with them, asked me.
"It's like living in a Greek tragedy," I told her. "These guys define hubris. I'm afraid it will be our downfall."
The lack of deference seen as an asset in Silicon Valley didn't play well among the status-conscious players of the Wall Street establishment.
Nor did the twenty-three million shares of stock we had neglected to register with the SEC before giving them to employees. Or the interview Larry and Sergey had done with
Playboy
the week before filing the S-1. We didn't think it would come out until after the IPO date, but on August 12, there it was on the PR department's fax machine, with a cover sheet from
Playboy
's editors saying, "Enjoy and Congrats!" We didn't enjoy, because the SEC made us include the full text of the article in our filing statement and pushed back our IPO a week.
I took advantage of the unexpected break to arrange a quickie vacation to San Diego with Kristen and our kids, who barely recognized me anymore. A day before our planned departure, though, my wife's grandmother passed away. Kristen flew to Seattle for the funeral, and I stayed home with the children, doing loads of laundry, shopping for groceries, and playing board games while running to my laptop every few minutes to respond to emails about budgeting, trademarks, and trade show giveaways.
It was an odd interregnum. My life had been moving so quickly, I hadn't taken a break in what seemed like years. Now I was overcome by lethargy, perhaps induced by exhaustion or by the knowledge that I had become part of something larger and that, consequentially, my individual contribution had become less essential. In my early days at Google, if I didn't do the marketing tasks, they didn't get done. Now Google overflowed with PMs, APMs, PMMs, and APMMs eager to showcase their abilities.
The Saturday before our scheduled offering, Jonathan put out the word that he had hired a director of product marketing. The era of corporate marketing had truly ended and the era of product marketing had formally begun.
I cut my vacation short and returned to work early on Thursday, August 19—IPO day—to watch the circus. I drove by the TV trucks and into the parking lot. The auction for Google shares had ended, the initial price was set at eighty-five dollars, and when the markets opened, the world would tell us what it thought of the business we had built.
There was no company meeting scheduled. Sergey was with us in Mountain View to set the proper tone: it was a Thursday like any other, and we needed to stay focused on the work ahead of us. The rest of the executives were at the NASDAQ, preparing to start the day's trading. Larry called Sergey, according to David Krane, and gave him a rundown. Not on the valuation he expected, but on the technology being used by the traders. "Here's what I'm looking at," Krane heard Larry tell Sergey. "Here's what the systems look like, and here's how much data is passing through. This is how fast it's updating. This is the resolution of the displays. This is how big the displays are, how many they have..."
I joined a half dozen employees gathered around a TV mounted on the wall above the PR cubicles. On the screen, a bunch of people in suits stood before a large electronic display. I didn't recognize Larry at first, wearing a gray jacket, a white shirt, and a red tie. Was this the guy I had seen sweating on a locker room bench as he struggled out of his hockey pads? Eric stood to Larry's left and Omid looked over his shoulder, as Larry picked up a marker and signed his name on a glass screen, and by so doing, made them all billionaires. Someone standing behind me opened a single bottle of cheap champagne, poured it into paper cups, and passed it around. Then we went back to our desks.