Authors: Ken Auletta
Tags: #Industries, #Computer Industry, #Business & Economics
Googled (5 page)
Al Gore, who has served as a consultant and adviser to Google since soon after he left the White House in 2001, likes to talk of Google’s “great values.” He told me he believes these values are spreading to other companies. Those who attribute Google’s success to its algorithms or “the law of increasing returns,” he said, fail to fully appreciate “the extent to which Google’s superior talent recruitment stems from its unusual empowerment of employees and the attention they pay to the quality of the employee experience at Google.” The best engineering schools produce a few near geniuses each year, and the reason he said Google is “getting more than their fair share of the most talented” is that they target them. “I’ve called college seniors for them,” he said, adding, “It’s not only in the recruiting and retention of the higher-quality employees. It also has to do with their alignment with community values, with trying to make the world a better place. People unlock a higher fraction of their creative potential when they feel that what they’re doing is about more than making a buck, or more than enhancing the business scorecard and building the value of the company. When they think that what they’re doing is something that makes the world a better place, I don’t think that’s just touchy-feely stuff.”
THE REST OF THE world, particularly the media part of it, doesn’t always have a “touchy-feely” view of the company. Google has been sued by Viacom for allegedly allowing YouTube to pirate its television programs, by publishers and the Authors Guild for digitizing their books without permission, and came close to being sued by the Associated Press for linking to its stories without paying compensation. Newspapers and magazines are alarmed that Google News and Google search link to their content and don’t pay for it. Hollywood frets that YouTube enlarges its own audience and diminishes theirs. Advertising companies are alarmed that Google and DoubleClick retain so much information that their advertising clients might turn to Google to purchase their online advertising, and maybe design their ads. Telephone companies are alarmed that Google is pushing into their mobile phone business. All feared Google would devise a navigation system for their media akin to what search was for the Web, and thus would be poised to become the traffic cop for all media.
Schmidt said he, Brin, and Page often ask themselves: “How can you grow big without doing evil?” He believes Google has become a lightning rod, particularly for old media. “In our society bigness is often associated with bad,” he said. “There is no question that a company with the ambitions of Google will generate controversy, will have people upset with us. The question is: Where does it come from? Is it coming from a competitor? Is it coming from a business whose business model is being endangered by the Internet? Or is it because we’re behaving badly?”
Schmidt believes the hostility comes from threatened competitors who scapegoat Google. “When you have a technology that is as engrossing as the Internet, you’re going to have winners and losers,” he said. “I’m not trying to sound arrogant. I’m trying to sound rational about it. The Internet allows people to consume media in a different way. They’re going to do it.” Schmidt acknowledged that, in his own naivete, Google has probably fanned paranoia. “Google is run by three computer scientists,” he said. “We’re going to make all the mistakes computer scientists running a company would make. But one of the mistakes we’re not going to make is the mistake that nonscientists make. We’re going to make mistakes based on facts and data and analysis.”
Schmidt’s summation understates the mistakes Google will make, and has made, because its computer scientists live on their own planet and often harbor disdain for the way others think. Terry Winograd, who was Larry Page’s graduate school mentor at Stanford, and who still serves as an engineering consultant to Google, recounted a discussion at a TGIF he attended where an employee raised the question of one day splitting Google’s stock and asserted that a stock purchased at, say, four hundred dollars a share that was now selling at forty dollars per share because it had been split, would be perceived as not a good thing for employees because the perception would be that their stock was worth less. Page erupted, “It’s stupid. If you own ten shares at forty dollars and one share at four hundred dollars, it’s the same thing! You just need to know how to divide.”
This is “logically true,” said Winograd. “But there is an emotional issue here. He felt that those who disagreed were not thinking logically, were being stupid.”
Logic, however, is not always universal. The planet is occupied by humans, who often make decisions under the guise of a logic that others deem stupid. Great leaders have the empathy to factor this wisdom into their deliberations. They know Robert Louis Stevenson understood a broader truth when he wrote: “No man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantomagoric chamber of his brain, with all the painted windows and storied wall.” That Larry Page and Sergey Brin—and many Google employees—are brilliant is a conclusion cemented by the tale of Google’s rise. Whether they are also wise is not as clear-cut.
PART TWO
The Google Story
CHAPTER TWO
Starting in a Garage
I
n early 1998, Bill Gates couldn’t envision what was to come. Microsoft was at the apex of its power, with revenues that would reach $14.5 billion by year’s end, with ever-rising profits, a soaring stock valuation, more than twenty-seven thousand employees, and a market share of computer operating systems that encompassed more than 90 percent of all desk and laptop PCs. The government had not yet sued it for monopolistic practices, or convinced two federal courts that Bill Gates’s company was guilty. At the time, Microsoft was so flush that it had flirted with investing in Hollywood, having already dispatched its chief technology officer and dealmaker, Nathan P. Myhrvold, to spend an anthropological week with DreamWorks cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg.
n early 1998, Bill Gates couldn’t envision what was to come. Microsoft was at the apex of its power, with revenues that would reach $14.5 billion by year’s end, with ever-rising profits, a soaring stock valuation, more than twenty-seven thousand employees, and a market share of computer operating systems that encompassed more than 90 percent of all desk and laptop PCs. The government had not yet sued it for monopolistic practices, or convinced two federal courts that Bill Gates’s company was guilty. At the time, Microsoft was so flush that it had flirted with investing in Hollywood, having already dispatched its chief technology officer and dealmaker, Nathan P. Myhrvold, to spend an anthropological week with DreamWorks cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg.
It was in that confident time that I visited Gates in his office on the sprawling Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, in 1998. In the course of our interview, I asked him to describe his competitive nightmare: “What challenge do you most fear?” He rocked gently back and forth, sipping from a can of Diet Coke, and silently pondered the question. When he finally spoke he did not recite the usual litany of prominent foes: Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Apple. Nor did he cite the federal government. Instead, he said, “I fear someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.” He had no idea where the garage might be—or even what country it might be in—nor could he guess the nature of the new technology. He just knew that innovation was usually the enemy of established companies.
As it happens, in 1998, in a Silicon Valley garage, Bill Gates’s nightmare came alive courtesy of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Page and Brin had met three years before, at orientation for incoming Stanford graduate students. They had much in common. Their fathers were college professors and their mothers worked in science; both were born in 1973 and raised in homes where issues were rigorously debated; both attended Montessori elementary schools, where they were granted freedom to study what they wished, and as public high school students they were besotted by computers; both were pursuing Ph.D.’s in computer science. They shared what John Battelle described as “a reflexive belief that whatever the status quo is, it’s wrong and there must be a better solution”; both, as Mark Malseed observed, had a “penchant for pushing boundaries—without asking for permission ...”
SERGEY MIKHAILOVICH BRIN’S PATH to Stanford started in Moscow, where he was born into a family steeped in science. His grandfather was a math professor; his great-grandmother had left the Soviet Union to study microbiology at the University of Chicago; his parents, Michael and Eugenia, were mathematicians. There were obstacles to their pursuit of science, though. Despite Michael’s Ph.D., anti-Semitism impeded his career: at Moscow State University he was not permitted to study his preferred subject, astrophysics, because it fell into the same department as nuclear research, and Jews were deemed too untrustworthy to enter that field. Eugenia Brin, a civil engineer, was more welcome in the renowned research lab of the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute, but she, too, felt constraints. “We were quite poor,” recalled Sergey, describing a three-hundred- to four-hundred-square-foot Moscow flat he shared with his parents and his grandmother, an English teacher. “My parents, both of them, went through periods of hardship. My life, in comparison, has been easy.”
In 1977, Michael Brin attended an international conference in Europe, and when he returned home he insisted that the family must apply for visas to escape the USSR. When he submitted an application the following year, though, he was abruptly fired. Warned of retribution, Eugenia quit her job. They eked out a life doing temporary work, schooling four-year-old Sergey at home. It wasn’t until two years later that their exit visas were granted. With assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, they immigrated to America, leaving most of their possessions behind.
They rented a cinder-block house in a multiracial, working-class suburb of Baltimore, near the University of Maryland. As in Moscow, they were poor, relying on the support of local Russian Jews. “My parents sort of lived in the dining room,” Sergey remembers. “There was no wall between the dining room and the kitchen. They used that as their bedroom.” Eventually, Michael became a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, where he specializes in Riemannian geometry; Eugenia Brin became a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. They had a second son, Sam, fourteen years Sergey’s junior.
Sergey enrolled in the local Montessori school where classes were comprised of students in a three-year age range. Typical of Montessori programs, the school adapted itself to the child. “It’s not like somebody is telling you what to do,” Sergey said. “You have to plot your own path.” Because he initially spoke little English, he retreated into math puzzles, science projects, and maps. For his ninth birthday, his parents gave Sergey a Commodore 64 computer, a seminal gift for a man who now gleefully describes himself as a nerd. Some years later, when a friend got an early Macintosh computer, they began to devise artificial intelligence programs and software to simulate gravity.
Sergey’s prowess at math was encouraged by his father, a stern tutor, who sometimes graded student papers with the salutation “My sincere condolences.” Family meals featured intense discussions. Sergey was not much interested in listening to music or watching TV Nor was he an avid reader of books, though he was engrossed by the life of Richard P. Feynman, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics who “not only made big contributions in his field,” Sergey once said, but wanted to be “a Leonardo, an artist” as well as a scientist. “I found that pretty inspiring.” Although he says he “probably had more nerdy interests than most of my peers,” his heroes—Feynman at a young age, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett later—suggest the breadth of his ambition.
He was also a rebellious child. When he was thirteen, his parents took him to visit the Soviet Union and he threw pebbles at Soviet policemen, causing a scene that his parents defused only by pledging to the irate authorities that he would be severely punished at home. Sergey is still very emotional about autocratic governments and anti-Semitism. But even though he was raised as a Jew and attended Hebrew school for a few years, he was nonpracticing, did not have a bar mitzvah, and was put off by traditional Jewish celebrations, which he once told an Israeli reporter he “associated with getting lots of gifts and money, and I was never comfortable with that.” When he was married on an island in the Bahamas in May of 2007 to Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of 23andMe, a genetics research company, the couple stood in bathing suits under a chuppah, the traditional Jewish wedding canopy, but no rabbi officiated.
Then, as now, he was uncomfortable with introspection. Asked by the same Israeli reporter if it was a coincidence that his wife was Jewish, he said, “I believe there are lots of nice non-Jewish girls out there. My wife is, I guess, half Jewish.”
So was it a coincidence, the reporter pressed, that his wife was half Jewish?
“That wasn’t a concern for me,” he responded. “I don’t know, maybe it was for her.”
I once asked him, “What part of your success do you trace to qualities in your parents?”
“It’s hard to say,” he answered.
After much coaxing, he added, “A certain love for science and learning and the beautiful mathematical things I have been able to put into practice is part of my upbringing.”
He attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Baltimore, a public school where muscles counted more than brains. This setting didn’t diminish Sergey’s cocky swagger, though, and he blitzed through in three years, gathering enough college credits there to allow him to also graduate from the University of Maryland in three years. Although he was just nineteen, Sergey flourished at college, where he was a math and computer science major and was treated by the faculty as a peer. “I was a pretty advanced student,” he said.
After graduation, he received a National Science Foundation scholarship to study computer science at Stanford, where he believed he was “better prepared” than classmates. His special interest, data mining, was a relatively new field in which computers are used to extract and analyze information from enormous fields of data. He expected to get a Ph.D. and maybe become a professor. As at Montessori, he worked at his own pace. His father once told authors David Vise and Mark Malseed for their book,
The Google Story,
“I asked him if he was taking any advanced courses one semester. He said, ‘Yes, advanced swimming.’” Craig Silverstein, a fellow data-mining student who would become Google’s first employee, remembers that Sergey rarely studied, yet “he passed all his tests in the first year, and didn’t take any in the second year. Already he had this reputation as a kind of genius.” Brin recalled taking eight comprehensive tests: “When I first tried, I passed all seven. The one I thought I was best at, I didn’t pass. I went to the prof and debated the answers. I wound up talking him into it. So I passed all eight. I think I was the only one.”
The Google Story,
“I asked him if he was taking any advanced courses one semester. He said, ‘Yes, advanced swimming.’” Craig Silverstein, a fellow data-mining student who would become Google’s first employee, remembers that Sergey rarely studied, yet “he passed all his tests in the first year, and didn’t take any in the second year. Already he had this reputation as a kind of genius.” Brin recalled taking eight comprehensive tests: “When I first tried, I passed all seven. The one I thought I was best at, I didn’t pass. I went to the prof and debated the answers. I wound up talking him into it. So I passed all eight. I think I was the only one.”
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