Authors: Ken Auletta
Tags: #Industries, #Computer Industry, #Business & Economics
Googled (33 page)
BUT THE SPEED OF GOOGLE’S ascent and its expansive commercial ambitions came to overshadow its noble ambitions. Google grew up very fast. In their first annual letter to shareholders, in 2004, Page and Brin wrote of Google: “If it were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer, and today it would have just finished the first grade.” Three years later,
Search Engine Land’s
Danny Sullivan thought Google had prematurely entered its awkward teenage years. “The story of Google today is perhaps the adolescent period they are going through. How do they deal with the challenges of the growth they are going through? You are going to go through this wave of people leaving Google. They don’t need to work there anymore. And it’s not going to be fun, which will change the culture.”
Search Engine Land’s
Danny Sullivan thought Google had prematurely entered its awkward teenage years. “The story of Google today is perhaps the adolescent period they are going through. How do they deal with the challenges of the growth they are going through? You are going to go through this wave of people leaving Google. They don’t need to work there anymore. And it’s not going to be fun, which will change the culture.”
“Google’s become a big company,” said Paul Buchheit, who left Google in 2006 to start
Friendfeed.com
. “It’s a very different environment.” As with most big companies, he said “priorities become based more on what looks good internally. You become distant from the users. When you get bigger, some engineer comes up with this crazy project, but he’s four or five layers from Larry. These layers in between are going to serve up all sorts of weird barriers.” There’s little incentive, he said, for individuals to innovate because the bureaucracy becomes cautious, overwhelmed with a terror “not to look dumb.” Asked for a more concrete example, the engineer who distilled Google into a powerfully simple slogan retreats to this sweeping analogy: “It’s an entire system. Think about the Soviet Union. They had lots of brilliant people. But there was an economic system there that encouraged certain kinds of behavior. They failed to innovate because the system was wrong.” Buchheit’s critique is echoed by Scott Heiferman, CEO and cofounder of the social network site
Meetup.com
, who has hired some former Googlers who left the company because it got too big. “Google did not invent YouTube. They tried and failed with Google Video. Google did not invent Facebook. They tried and failed with Orkut.” Aside from search, Heiferman said, “Google has actually failed at most things.”
Friendfeed.com
. “It’s a very different environment.” As with most big companies, he said “priorities become based more on what looks good internally. You become distant from the users. When you get bigger, some engineer comes up with this crazy project, but he’s four or five layers from Larry. These layers in between are going to serve up all sorts of weird barriers.” There’s little incentive, he said, for individuals to innovate because the bureaucracy becomes cautious, overwhelmed with a terror “not to look dumb.” Asked for a more concrete example, the engineer who distilled Google into a powerfully simple slogan retreats to this sweeping analogy: “It’s an entire system. Think about the Soviet Union. They had lots of brilliant people. But there was an economic system there that encouraged certain kinds of behavior. They failed to innovate because the system was wrong.” Buchheit’s critique is echoed by Scott Heiferman, CEO and cofounder of the social network site
Meetup.com
, who has hired some former Googlers who left the company because it got too big. “Google did not invent YouTube. They tried and failed with Google Video. Google did not invent Facebook. They tried and failed with Orkut.” Aside from search, Heiferman said, “Google has actually failed at most things.”
Ask Google executives to describe their biggest future concern, and more often than not they say size. Growing too big and losing focus is Omid Kordestani’s foremost worry. At Netscape, he said, the company drifted away from founder Jim Clark’s vision of it as a company whose browser enabled Internet communication. “Suddenly we became more of an enterprise company than a Web company, even though we started the browser.” When Netscape rushed too quickly to issue an IPO in 1995, he said, pressure was on to generate more revenues, to perform on a very public stage for the press, to “focus on quarter to quarter” performance.
“For the last year my biggest worry was scaling the business,” Schmidt said in May 2007. “The problem is we’re growing so quickly. When you bring in people so quickly there’s always the possibility you’ll lose the formula. How do you manage engineering teams that are not on one campus? How do you manage across time zones? How do you keep the culture?”
IN ADDITION TO the natural concerns with rapid growth, critics both inside and outside Google believe the company has real management weaknesses. Paul Buchheit believes Google has succumbed to the disease of bigness that he says afflicts “every big company” and has become bureaucratic. There are many bottlenecks at Google. A former Google executive criticizes “micro management at the top,” and said a prime example is that the founders and Schmidt, or their designees, “have to sign off on each hire. That’s OK when you are hiring five new employees.” In 2007 and early 2008, Google was hiring 150 people per week. Because most decisions about new employees, deals, or policy “have to go to the top,” the process is slowed. Echoing a common thought, an executive who is a Google corporate ally and works closely with them said, “In many ways, it’s a very disorganized company. It looks to me like they are caught in this interesting conflict between a company that is overmanaged and undermanaged. They have a control mechanism at the top that has inordinate control. And at the same time, there is too much freedom.” He lists two complaints: “You can’t get answers out of Google when you want to schedule something,” so there are long waits. And “they are structured to allow way too many people to participate,” which results in endless meetings.
The founders get diverted by issues that should not require their attention. Eric Schmidt described a Monday management committee meeting in March 2008 during which they discussed how, under California labor laws, a review was necessary to determine whether their many massage therapists should become full-time employees. The significant plus was that they would receive full benefits. The significant minus was that tipping would be prohibited. The issue had first been raised at the TGIF meeting the previous Friday. The founders, massage regulars, were agitated. Schmidt, who said he has “never had a massage at Google, and never will,” was impatient, and blurted, “You guys are in charge of this.”
“‘We’re on it!’” they said.
That afternoon, Page and Brin scheduled another meeting to resolve the issue. “This is where the team really works well,” Schmidt explained. “I knew what I wanted, which was to get the hell out of the meeting! Larry and Sergey knew they had to get involved in an employee issue.” The founders resolved the issue by making them “variable part-time employees” and allowing tipping to be continued as long as it was reported. This incident can be viewed as an example of teamwork; it can also be seen as an example of micromanagement.
The founders’ zeal for efficiencies extends to the unusual way they manage their time. They used to share three assistants. No longer. They share an office on the second floor of Building 43 without secretaries or assistants to guard the entrance, keep them on schedule, or answer phones (which don’t ring anyway). A staircase whose banister is festooned with a large green kite leads from their regular office on the main level to a glassed loft where they work on desktop computers with oversized screens, circled by unpacked cartons on the floor, a large massage chair, and gym equipment so that Brin can stretch his cranky back. A helmeted spacesuit with the name Sergey Brin on a breast pouch is splayed on a hanging stand facing the offices below. (Brin has applied and left a $5 million deposit for one of the six seats on Space Adventures’
Soyuz
spacecraft’s 2012 orbital trip.) Another staircase allows them to slip out of the building and to the parking lot where they daily leave their commuting vehicles, including two Priuses, two $109,000 Tesla Roadster electric sports cars from the company they’ve each invested in, and a couple of bicycles.
Soyuz
spacecraft’s 2012 orbital trip.) Another staircase allows them to slip out of the building and to the parking lot where they daily leave their commuting vehicles, including two Priuses, two $109,000 Tesla Roadster electric sports cars from the company they’ve each invested in, and a couple of bicycles.
Asked why they have no assistants, Page gave a revealing answer. They do have an assistant “from time to time,” he said, but “the amount of time it takes me to actually schedule is not very high because of Google Calendar. Occasionally, I have to go back and forth with somebody, but usually they’ll meet when I want to meet anyway. It’s not like I have to negotiate very much.” He laughed, gently. “I’m not sure it would work for everybody, but for me it’s worked pretty well. Also, it’s actually allowed me to have more time. People are willing to ask an assistant: ‘Will Larry come and talk at this thing?’ But if they actually have to e-mail me about it, they think twice. It’s not that anybody in the company can’t e-mail me. It’s that they realize they shouldn’t be using my time that way. So the number of requests I’ve gotten has gone down, which is kind of nice.”
What isn’t so nice for Google executives is that they often don’t know where the founders are, or if they will attend meetings. Page and Brin resist being tied to someone else’s schedule. With no assistant to contact, the way executives learn if one or both founders will attend a meeting is if they see that Page or Brin has placed the meeting on his online Google Calendar, which senior Google executives share. Sometimes, Schmidt said, the founders show up unscheduled for the wrong meetings. Sometimes they disappear—Larry suddenly to tour a cafeteria to make sure it seats no more than one hundred and fifty, which he insists is the maximum size to inspire a team culture; Sergey or Larry to disappear from the office (if the wind has picked up) to pursue their kite-surfing hobby, which relies on a small surfboard and wind to propel the kite and skim across the water.
Schmidt defends management chaos, or at least a degree of it, as a style that fits the founders, and he offered an illustration. For months he tried to get the founders to craft a corporate strategy memo for the future, believing their “brilliance” produces unique insights. He couldn’t pin them down. Finally, on a business trip to Seville, he opened his e-mail and up popped a draft from Brin. “Perfect,” he thought, and shared it with Page, who was on the trip. Page made his edits, then Schmidt did some edits and circulated the draft to Google’s management with a “What’s missing?” note. “Why couldn’t I get them to write this in a normal way?” Schmidt asked. “That’s not the way their minds work. Their ideas are much better than mine. I can’t write the memo, and in that you see why they are the founders.”
Whatever their brilliance, each member of the troika running Google has the same liability, said an industry insider who knows them well. “None is an inspirational leader, a great salesman, or a great speaker.” Their brilliance and success move people, but not their words or the symbols they evoke. They are not Steve Jobs, not gifted salesmen or evangelical leaders.
Page and Brin differ from Jobs in another significant way. Al Gore, who has had a ringside seat at the management of both Apple and Google, said that he deeply admires the founders of each company, but “a genius like Steve comes along only once in several generations.” Jobs has demonstrated his genius over a longer period of time than Page and Brin, he believes, and also has benefited from something the Google founders lack: “Steve has the great if painful experience of failing, and coming back.” The wisdom that comes from failure has not yet punched Page and Brin.
It was time in the spring of 2008 for executives to make tough choices among the 150 products Google produced. Why 150 products? “That can be stated as criticism, but it can also be stated as strategy,” Schmidt responded. “The goal of the company is customer satisfaction. You should think of Google as one product”: customer satisfaction. This response summons memories of Yahoo’s famous Peanut Butter Manifesto. Composed in November 2006 as an internal memo by Yahoo senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse, it was leaked and caused a stir in the Valley. Garlinghouse wrote:
We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything—to everyone.... I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
Search gives Google more of a focus than a self-proclaimed “media company” like Yahoo might have. Yet a departed Google executive, who like many who voice criticism of Google’s management chooses to do so anonymously, said, “Google could do fewer products and make less investments. They are doing too many products and peanut buttering everything.”
Why?
“They’ve never had to make hard choices,” answered the former executive. “The company is so successful that it can do anything. They think they can make energy. Why? They have passion. That’s what makes Google great. The question is when things get hard, can they make tough decisions?”
The CEO of an old media company described a visit he and his COO made to Google a few years ago. They were doing what Mel Karmazin had done: take a tour of Google and have a meal with the founders and Schmidt. As an executive led them around, they paused to look at the gallery of photographs of the projects Google had launched. The Google executive explained the 20 percent time each engineer was given. The COO asked, “Has there ever been a project started where someone said, ‘OK, it’s not what we thought it was. We should get rid of it.’?”
“I don’t think so,” answered their tour guide.
When I pressed a longtime Google executive to recall the products the company had canceled, he came up with just two: Google Answers and Google Catalog Search. “This is a company that doesn’t set priorities,” said another former Google executive. Part of the reason, this person said, traces to the founders. “It’s the Talmud of the founders. The word of God. And everyone interprets the word of God at Google.”
It’s very hard not to defer to founders who have been right so often. But here’s where Schmidt is criticized for not imposing his will. One reason, said a former Google executive, is because “He hates confrontation.” A second reason, said another former manager, is because “Eric runs the company—unless there’s someting Larry really cares about. Anything Larry cares about, he runs. Like products.” Brin is said to assert himself on fewer things, but on advertising and privacy policies, business deals, or “Google’s approach to China, Sergey rules.” The prominent CEO of one company that does business with Google said he found Schmidt “odd, as if he’s holding something back. In the guise of someone who is straight—a sincere, decent, thoughtful, kind man—he is something different than all of those qualities. In his business dealings people will tell you that if he said, ‘OK, I agree to this,’ you will find that he actually hasn’t done so. If you confront him, he said he couldn’t. Or he forgot. Or he gives you gobbledegook.”
Why? “He is not the decider,” the CEO answered. “Yet in certain areas he pretends that he is. Eric is smoothly duplicitous.”
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