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Authors: Ken Auletta

Tags: #Industries, #Computer Industry, #Business & Economics

Googled (12 page)

BOOK: Googled
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And Page, for all his mania about efficiency, could be obsessive. A footnote buried at the back of Battelle’s book on search provides an illustration. He writes of seeking an interview with Page and receiving this weird counterproposal:
In exchange for sitting down with me, Page wanted the right to review every mention of Google, Page, or Brin in my book, then respond in footnotes. Such a deal would have been nearly impossible to realize, and would have required untold hours of work on Page’s part. Page and I negotiated for weeks over his proposal.... In the end, Page relented.
Like the founders‘, Schmidt’s background was fairly narrow. He was an engineer, with management experience. He had little experience working with advertisers or media companies, which would soon become apparent. But what he did have was maturity and an even temperament. It was said, sometimes by Schmidt himself, that he was brought in to supply “adult supervision.” He was the friendly, wise man with a touch of gray in his neatly parted sandy hair. Eventually, Schmidt became Google’s facilitator, or “catcher,” as he likes to describe his role. “I catch whatever the problem is.” (When I later asked the decidedly non-sports-loving Brin if this description was accurate, he said, “I don’t know what a catcher does.”) The more serious answer, Schmidt added, is that he facilitates decisions that need to be made, establishing management systems, meeting with financial analysts and reporters, serving as Google’s chief link to industry and government. To the founders these were odious tasks, but increasingly important ones. He focused Google on outside technological dangers. “He made us better understand competition in the technology space,” said Marissa Mayer. Google once thought its competition came from search engines like Alta Vista or Overture. “Eric said, ’If we’re successful, Microsoft is going to jump in [to search].‘ Larry and Sergey and I were surprised.”
What could a late entrant like Microsoft do to impede Google? Schmidt, having spent much of his career in opposition to Microsoft, and having supported the government’s antitrust prosecution of the software giant, explained how Microsoft could use its dominant Internet Explorer browser or Windows operating system, on which search engines depended, to cripple Google. Discussions like this, said Mayer, helped persuade Google to build its own applications and, eventually, its own browser, to ensure its independence.
Schmidt also helped focus Google internally. When he discovered that nearly half of Google’s searches were coming from outside America, yet there was no concerted effort to sell ads against these searches, he seized the opportunity. He prodded Omid Kordestani to travel overseas, jokingly saying, “I’ll call you Monday morning at the United terminal and tell you what plane to get on.” Kordestani gained so much weight from eating fast food while on the road that when he returned from his successful trips abroad he would touch his belly and laugh, “Body by United!” Among Schmidt’s signal accomplishments, said Paul Buchheit, was that he kept Page and Brin “focused” and “kept things on track.” Often at meetings, he said, Page and Brin would suddenly change the topic at whim. “Eric would say, ‘No, we need to come to an understanding right now.’”
Soon after Schmidt’s arrival, the troika was romanced by Yahoo’s new CEO, Terry S. Semel, who had come to a Web business after twenty-four years as co-chairman and co-CEO of Warner Bros. Semel came to Yahoo at a time when Internet stocks had plunged; Yahoo’s stock had fallen from a market value peak of $127 billion to $12.6 billion. His arrival aroused the righteous anger of many in the Valley, who were suspicious of “outsiders.” He was dismissed as a representative of old media, as a troglodyte, a Hollywood suit. But the old media warhorse knew how to calm an anxious company, handing out backslaps, compliments. He was a self-proclaimed content guy, and wanted Yahoo to create more of its own, not just license the content of others. And he wanted to sell more ads. He brought in a former ABC network executive, Lloyd Braun, to oversee new content, and an experienced sales team led by Wenda Harris Millard. “Terry brought two things,” said Bobby Kotick, now the CEO of the game company Activision Blizzard, who served on the Yahoo board. Semel was “genetically predisposed to making money,” and if he was presented with one hundred ideas, he could spot the one or two that would make money. “He brought that. And he just brought the maturity and wisdom that comes from experience. He asked the simple question: ‘How do we make money?’”
Semel had huge gaps in his knowledge of the digital world and of Yahoo. He was shocked to learn that Yahoo had lost ninety-eight million dollars the year he arrived. Ron Conway recalled a dinner with Semel on his first day at Yahoo. He said, “Semel did not know Yahoo owned part of Google” in the form of the warrants it banked when it signed its search engine contract with Google. An avid deal maker, Semel became intrigued by Google, particularly after Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo’s founders, urged him, he recalled, to “go meet these guys.”
Semel joined Page, Brin, and Schmidt for dinner in the Google cafeteria. Semel began the discussion: “Help me with something. We’re your biggest customer in the world, right? We both know what we pay you for the whole world is less than ten million dollars, right?”
“Yes,” they concurred.
“So what’s your business?” Semel asked. “You don’t really have a business.”
“We love what we do,” Page and Brin responded.
“Maybe we should buy your company?” said Semel, who thought it was enough of a business to throw out a billion-dollar purchase price tag.
“No, no. We don’t really want to sell our company.”
Semel walked away convinced “one hundred percent they did not want to sell.” He also walked away with assurances from Schmidt that Google was working on “their own technology” to monetize search. Later that year, when Overture approached Yahoo with their patented monetization technology and offered Yahoo a revenue guarantee, Semel signed a contract for Overture to sell its ads. Google was upset, but Semel said that in the first full year, Overture generated two hundred million dollars of advertising revenues. By 2003, Overture separately approached Yahoo and Microsoft with an offer to be acquired. Microsoft declined to bid. (They later reversed course and started up their own search engine.) In the end, Semel acquired two search engines, Overture and Inktomi, and Yahoo dropped its search license agreement with Google. (It was beginning to become clear what a colossal blunder it had been for Yahoo to farm out search in order to focus on building its portal traffic, relegating Yahoo to a weak second place in search. By buying Overture, Yahoo also inherited its April 2002 patent infringement lawsuit against Google.)
Google was growing fast, and the founders worried they’d divide into cliques and lose their cohesive culture. Stacy Sullivan, who had been hired in 1999 as the first employee in human resources, and Joan Braddi, Omid Kordestani’s trusted deputy, were asked to assemble a disparate group of early Googlers to devise a coherent mission statement of core principles the company could embrace. Twelve employees gathered in the cafe, each from a different department. The discussion went in circles for several hours, with Sullivan dutifully writing cliches on a whiteboard. Some wanted the group to enunciate a set of rules: Don’t mistreat people; Don’t be late; Don’t lose user focus; Play hard but keep the puck down. The engineers in the room weren’t interested in codified dos and don‘ts because they reeked of corporate America and offended their sense of efficiency. They also took too long to read. After hours of exasperating discussion, Paul Buchheit blurted, “All of these things can be covered by just saying
’Don’t be evil.”‘
Within a day, engineer Amit Patel, Google employee number 7, wrote the slogan in impeccable handwriting on whiteboards all over Google’s offices. The slogan became viral. When opposing an idea at internal meetings, Googlers would proclaim, “That could be evil.” The slogan became Google’s rallying cry, a way to distinguish itself from other corporations and Microsoft in particular, a way to harness the goodwill Google enjoyed as a free service bringing the world’s information to everyone’s fingertips. To former Intel chairman and CEO Andy Grove, the slogan was too vague to define a boundary, and smacked of self-righteousness. “Do you think Hitler thought he was evil?” Grove said he thought at the time. “It’s too vague, too self-serving, self-defining. ‘I’m not evil, therefore I’m not evil.’”
Eric Schmidt was happy with the slogan, though, and happy with what he was accomplishing at Google. Years later, he sat on one of three canvas-backed directors chairs jammed into the closet-sized conference room dubbed “the directors room” that is next to his office in Building 42. The view from a narrow vertical window overlooked a Google parking lot; the white brick wall to his left held a whiteboard containing mathematical formulas; to his right were several framed newspaper clippings, including one headlined “The Grown-Up at Google.” He admitted to feeling that he had grown as an executive since his days at Novell. “Most people who worked with me ten years ago,” Schmidt said, “would have said, ‘He’s smart, a nice guy, but he can’t lead.’ What is the distinction between then and now? Toughness.”
Back in 2001, his “toughness” was circumscribed. He did not issue orders to the founders, he had to persuade, to prioritize his concerns, and pick his battles. There were palpable tensions—the founders would sometimes loudly explode in meetings that the company was becoming bureaucratic, and Schmidt knew he was the target. These were three strangers working together, and the founders were uncomfortably ceding some management control over their invention, their baby. Schmidt knew the founders did not blame each other. There was rarely a hint of tension between Page and Brin—“In all the years I’ve worked with them,” said John Doerr, who is a Google director, “I’ve never seen them get angy with each other.” But it was not unusual, said another early investor, to witness emotional outbursts by the founders aimed at others, and to see these outbursts fielded and defused by the calm, self-effacing Schmidt. The go-slow, relaxed way that Schmidt approached the founders or changed the management meetings or eventually chased a squatter from his office was at times exasperating to others. While describing Schmidt as “the unsung hero” of Google, Shriram admits, “He had a slow start.” The founders at first, he said, “challenged everything,” and openly wondered: “Could they trust his judgment?” Meanwhile, the VCs were pushing for a revenue plan. And Moritz was skeptical that Schmidt was the right man to bully it through Google.
Schmidt needed help to lower the emotional temperature, and to upgrade Google’s management. That help came in the form of Bill Campbell, then sixty-one, a barrel-chested man known throughout Silicon Valley as “the coach.” At one time Columbia University’s head football coach, Campbell had also been a senior executive at Apple and a CEO of several Valley companies, including the Go Corporation and Intuit, the now-thriving online software company that provides financial services to individuals and small businesses and where he worked side by side with the founder. John Doerr knew that Campbell felt an obligation to give back to a Silicon Valley that had made him rich enough to own his own Gulfstream IV His discretion is legendary, and part of his allure. Aside from a profile in the magazine of his alma mater, the only other time he has ever been profiled was in a superb 2008
Fortune
magazine piece by Jennifer Reingold titled, “The Secret Coach.” His many friends offered tributes but Campbell would not sit for an interview. A Google search retrieves very few Campbell press mentions.
Doerr served on Campbell’s Intuit board, and had called on him to mentor young leaders of Valley companies. Regularly, Campbell would join fifteen or so of Doerr’s dot-com CEO clients over dinner. The sessions are dubbed Camp Campbell, “and I’m not allowed to attend,” said Doerr, who described Campbell “as one of my two best friends.” In late summer of 2001, Doerr reached out to his friend to help Schmidt and the founders. “I felt it was an opportunity worth Bill’s time,” he said. “Eric had not been CEO on a scale Google would become. Larry and Sergey and Eric needed to be coached.”
In the Valley, Coach Campbell is a magnet for friends old and new. Still the chairman of Intuit, he is also the colead outside director at Apple, and one of Steve Jobs’s few confidants. On weekends and evenings, when big college or professional football and basketball games are televised, Campbell can often be found with a group of buddies in downtown Palo Alto’s Old Pro sports bar, a Stanford student hangout he owns. He’ll have a table in the middle of the pub piled high with hamburgers, French fries, pizzas, and his preferred drink, Bud Lite. Just under six feet tall, Campbell is easily spotted, and not just by the Kennedyesque thatch of gray hair that sprawls across his forehead: he’s the guy in constant motion, moving about the room dispensing high fives, fist pumps, hugs, and baseball caps. He sports an oversized Columbia 1962 ring and weighs just three or four pounds more than he did as a college linebacker. At the Old Pro, he’s garrulous. Outside, he’s allergic to interviews with reporters, and even with friends he sequesters conversations he has with other intimates. His discretion is well known, and part of his allure.
In a rare 2007 interview with two McKinsey & Co’s partners for the
McKinsey Quarterly,
Campbell said something that is music to engineers at places like Google: “empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company.” He was talking about a tech company, and he went on to say that to foster innovation “you’ve got to be careful that you don’t make engineers beholden to product-marketing people. For me, growth is the goal, and growth comes through having innovation. Innovation comes through having great engineers, not great product-marketing guys.” He also said that smart tech executives should spend entire days “doing nothing but reviewing projects. A whole day, with the whole management team, so that we can clean up those projects, clean out the ones that aren’t going to be good, and take the bodies that are recovered and put them on the projects that look like they have the best prospects.”
BOOK: Googled
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