Authors: Ken Auletta
Tags: #Industries, #Computer Industry, #Business & Economics
Googled (8 page)
For $1,700 a month, the just-formed company sublet new office space: the two-car Menlo Park garage and two downstairs spare rooms of an 1,800-square-foot house in Menlo Park. The owners were friends: Susan Wojcicki, an engineer at Intel, and her husband Dennis Troper, a product manager at a tech company. The newly constituted Google had found its way to them because Sergey had dated Susan’s roommate at Stanford Business School. The house was not located in the upscale sections of Menlo Park, near the Sand Hill Road offices made famous by the venture capitalists whose offices are there, or in nearby Atherton, where many of these venture capitalists live and in 2008 an acre of land could sell for $3 million. Rather, it was on a dreary flag lot at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue.
A concrete driveway led up to the garage, where a whiteboard had been attached with the legend, “Google Worldwide Headquarters.” Inside were three tables, three chairs, a dirty turquoise shag carpet, a tiny refrigerator, an old washer and dryer, and a Ping-Pong table that was kept folded because there wasn’t space to leave it open. They kept the garage door open for ventilation, and used a bathroom on the first floor of the house. Their desks were old pine doors that straddled sawhorses. On Monday mornings, Shriram met with Page and Brin in the cramped bedroom they used as an office, before flying to Amazon for the week. Days, nights, and weekends, Page and Brin and Silverstein lived and worked there, often leaving well after midnight in Silverstein’s ancient Porsche. “He’d start it and it would backfire five times—
rat-tat-tat-tat-tat,”
Brin said. “It sounded like a machine gun going off. We started pushing his car out onto the street before we’d start it.”
rat-tat-tat-tat-tat,”
Brin said. “It sounded like a machine gun going off. We started pushing his car out onto the street before we’d start it.”
Although it was still in beta testing in the early fall of 1998, Google was getting ten thousand search queries daily. “I was really getting excited about Google,” said Shriram. The founders were getting excited too. “Larry said, ‘We’ll be at the doorstep of information,’” Susan Wojcicki recalled. Brin told her the company “was going to be worth billions of dollars.” That was also what they told visitors from search and portal companies who came to Wojcicki’s living room to discuss the possibility of acquiring Google. Even though the founders had no interest in selling, Wojcicki recalls that they’d propose an outrageous price, knowing it would deflect suitors. They also used the house for their first press interview, with a correspondent from the German magazine
Stern,
in which they displayed a combination of grandiosity and zeal. Search really “does have a potential to really change things forever,” Brin said. It can “play a really important role in people’s lives, determining what information they get to look at,” said Page, adding, “and that’s an important thing to do for the world.” Although Google had scant income, Page and Brin believed that if they built Google, people would come.
Stern,
in which they displayed a combination of grandiosity and zeal. Search really “does have a potential to really change things forever,” Brin said. It can “play a really important role in people’s lives, determining what information they get to look at,” said Page, adding, “and that’s an important thing to do for the world.” Although Google had scant income, Page and Brin believed that if they built Google, people would come.
CHAPTER THREE
Buzz but Few Dollars
(1999-2000)
I
n early 1999, Google didn’t look like a company that would one day menace Microsoft. Aside from the one million dollars received from its four initial investors, and small amounts collected in the past half year from a handful of other angel investors like Ron Conway, Brin and Page had just a few sources of income: a twenty-thousand-dollar-per-month contract to provide specialized search results to Red Hat, a North Carolina consulting firm that advised companies using Linux and other open-source software, and the licensing of its search to several Web sites. Google had indexed only about 10 percent of the Web, and relied on a relatively primitive computer system to process search traffic that would explode from ten thousand to as many as five hundred thousand daily, each of which took three to four seconds to fetch results. To grow, Page and Brin knew their search engine had to “scale”: it had to crawl the entire Web, which would require vast computing power.
n early 1999, Google didn’t look like a company that would one day menace Microsoft. Aside from the one million dollars received from its four initial investors, and small amounts collected in the past half year from a handful of other angel investors like Ron Conway, Brin and Page had just a few sources of income: a twenty-thousand-dollar-per-month contract to provide specialized search results to Red Hat, a North Carolina consulting firm that advised companies using Linux and other open-source software, and the licensing of its search to several Web sites. Google had indexed only about 10 percent of the Web, and relied on a relatively primitive computer system to process search traffic that would explode from ten thousand to as many as five hundred thousand daily, each of which took three to four seconds to fetch results. To grow, Page and Brin knew their search engine had to “scale”: it had to crawl the entire Web, which would require vast computing power.
The first priority was recruiting engineers. By the end of 1998, a total of six Google employees were crammed into the garage and two small bedrooms. They’d need more room if they were going to expand. So in early 1999 they relocated to a five-thousand-square-foot second-floor space over a bicycle store in downtown Palo Alto, where they balanced more pine doors on sawhorses to make desks and began hiring engineers to fill them. The result was “a graduate-student Disneyland,” Michael Specter wrote in
The New Yorker
in 2000, stocked with hockey sticks, Rollerblades, granola, PowerBars, “urns of coffee, and coolers of fruit juice to drive anybody through to 4 A.M.—which is not an unusual time to find people in the office.” Even then massages were part of the Google culture; there was a sign advertising that the service was available in the conference room—when the room was not being used for work. A green Ping-Pong table served as their conference table, and that was where, in April 1999, they interviewed Marissa Mayer, then completing a computer science degree from Stanford. It was the peak of the Internet bubble, and the cream of graduating engineers like Mayer had their pick of jobs. Mayer is a brilliant engineer and a proud computer nerd, but with her porcelain skin and lustrous blond hair she seems far from the stereotype—until one hears her jarring high-pitched giggle and tries to follow her words, which gush so rapidly that they collide. Brin, aware of her interest in using math to solve puzzles like how to make a Web site user-friendly, quizzed her for more than an hour. “Larry said nothing the entire time. At the end of the interview I asked, ‘Do you speak?’”
The New Yorker
in 2000, stocked with hockey sticks, Rollerblades, granola, PowerBars, “urns of coffee, and coolers of fruit juice to drive anybody through to 4 A.M.—which is not an unusual time to find people in the office.” Even then massages were part of the Google culture; there was a sign advertising that the service was available in the conference room—when the room was not being used for work. A green Ping-Pong table served as their conference table, and that was where, in April 1999, they interviewed Marissa Mayer, then completing a computer science degree from Stanford. It was the peak of the Internet bubble, and the cream of graduating engineers like Mayer had their pick of jobs. Mayer is a brilliant engineer and a proud computer nerd, but with her porcelain skin and lustrous blond hair she seems far from the stereotype—until one hears her jarring high-pitched giggle and tries to follow her words, which gush so rapidly that they collide. Brin, aware of her interest in using math to solve puzzles like how to make a Web site user-friendly, quizzed her for more than an hour. “Larry said nothing the entire time. At the end of the interview I asked, ‘Do you speak?’”
She fit right in, and was invited back the next day to be interviewed separately by three engineers, who put her through the equivalent of a Ph.D. oral exam. Before making her an offer, Brin posed to his colleagues what has become known around Google as the airplane test. How would you feel, he asked, if you were stuck next to this person on a plane for several hours? Any candidate who failed this test was unlikely to be a good collaborator or team member. Mayer passed the test and became one of Google’s first twenty employees. (Because she was hired before completing school, Mayer is only certain she was between the fifteenth and twentieth employee.) Like all new employees, she was granted stock options that would one day make her wealthy, in her case enough to own a five-million-dollar penthouse apartment at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, filled with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein paintings, and a large, three-level Cape Cod house in Palo Alto.
Google now had a team of engineers but no idea how to attract new investors. Ram Shriram recalled telling Brin, “We need a business plan,” to which Brin replied, “What’s a business plan?” Weeks earlier, Salar Kamangar, a biology major at Stanford who was taking a fifth year to study economics, had volunteered to work for free. With Shriram as a tutor, he was drafted to draw up the business plan. Kamangar, employee number 8, prepared, he said, “a binder on what other companies were doing in search and what was different about Google.” Page and Brin were pleased, and asked him to develop a PowerPoint presentation to show potential investors that Shriram and Bechtolsheim were introducing them to. The founders also asked Kamangar to attend these meetings, but first needed to give him a title. They decided, he said, on “senior strategist.” In their first business plan, Google had a sketchy idea that they’d make money by charging companies for advanced search results and by getting digital advertising companies like DoubleClick to sell online ads of some kind. The revenue plan wasn’t very impressive, but the search engine was. Users were multiplying. Secrecy was the watchword. While Google search was still small, he knew it was much larger than competitors anticipated: “We were in stealth mode,” Kamangar said. “If first Yahoo and then Microsoft knew that our number of searches was so much larger, they would be more aggressive.” Repeatedly, Page explained his mania for secrecy by invoking the example of Tesla.
Google had to sell the venture capitalists (VCs), but they also had to build a sales force to secure revenues, and for this task they required an experienced senior strategist and salesman. Netscape had just been acquired by AOL, and Shriram knew that Omid Kordestani, the Iranian-born vice president of business development at Netscape, was ready to move on. He orchestrated a meeting between Kordestani and the founders. On paper, Kordestani was a perfect fit for vice president of sales and business development. He held an MBA from Stanford’s business school, an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, and the natural enthusiasm and agreeable personality of a salesman. But first he had to endure a free-for-all Ping-Pong table grilling by the founders and the engineers. Brin opened the interrogation by saying, “I’ve never interviewed a business person before.” From that inauspicious beginning, Kordestani remembers, “They drilled me for five hours.” At the end, no job offer was tendered. The founders had an aversion to business executives, stereotyping them as bureaucrats, not entrepreneurs, and they wanted reference checks. They asked the angel investor who wrote their first check, Andy Bechtolsheim, to make some calls.
“It was a very thoughtful process,” Kordestani said, perhaps euphemistically; the eventual job offer was followed by two weekends of intense negotiations in February 1999 with the founders and then with David Drummond, Google’s outside counsel at the powerhouse Valley firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. (That the hiring process was so laborious would provide good preparation for Drummond; he himself would undergo a milder version of it in 2002, when he was hired as Google’s chief legal officer and vice president of corporate development.) Drummond remembers how in the early days of Google, Page and Brin would visit Wilson Sonsini’s offices and minutely inspect every legal document, asking him to explain each detail. Kordestani was finally hired, and received a hefty 2 percent of the phantom stock, more than any Google employee aside from the founders and Eric Schmidt, who joined in 2001; when Google’s stock soared, Kordestani was a paper billionaire.
The hiring process at Google in some ways paralleled the algorithmic approach to search. Although the founders applied the airplane test, that criteria was less important than the premium they placed on SAT scores and on grades and degrees from the best colleges. Real-world experience counted less than objective measurements. The thought that an entire human being could be judged by objective criteria was preposterous. It was a reminder of the tunnel vision Brin and Page—like so many young entrepreneurs—brought to their work. One reason they succeed is that they refuse to be diverted from their goal. But aside from the business books Page read before he started Google, he and Brin were relatively narrow in scope, without a 360-degree view of the world.
The hiring process did have its light moments. David Krane was working in public relations at a software company when he heard about Google. He was taken with the quirky sensibility he found when he clicked on the “About Google” button on their Web site. The son of a nuclear physicist, Krane once harbored hopes of becoming a musician. He was enamored of technology and was a rarity among PR people in that he could explain the difference between PQA (palm query application software, which allowed Web material to be seen on a handheld device) and HTML (hypertext markup language, the dominant Web language). A friend passed his ré sume to Google’s then vice president of corporate communications, Cindy McCaffrey, who was hired in July 1999 as employee number 26. She interviewed him, as did countless other executives over the next four and a half months. Finally, separate interviews were arranged with Page and Brin, both of whom found public relations and marketing a form of huckster-ism. It was no surprise that the first question Brin asked was, “Explain something technical to me? Topic of your choice.”
Ideas rushed to Krane’s brain, and he made a surprising choice. He explained how to make a reed for a clarinet, how to file and test and tweak it so the musical tone was clear and warm.
Brin listened, then quickly moved on to his second question: “Have you ever heard of Slashdot?”
Slashdot was a technology news site that encouraged user-generated comments, a pioneer of what came to be known as blogging. Krane smiled and pulled from his pocket a geeky badge of honor: a Palm 7, which permitted a wireless Internet connection to one of his favorite sites, Slashdot .com. “I thought,” said Krane, “I had aced the interview!”
Brin shook hands and left, and Page entered. “He greeted me in a very reserved way. He asked me the equivalent of a tell-me-about-yourself ice-breaker question.” Krane waltzed through his life, his interests, his passion for Google. “I wasn’t getting any kind of signal back from Larry. It was like talking to a stone wall.” He thought, “I’m sinking!”
Desperate, he began to talk about music, and his musical training. He completed maybe three sentences when Page excitedly interrupted, “That’s where I know you!”
Krane was mystified.
“That’s where I know you! I was at Interlochen too, that same summer! And I also played saxophone!” They swapped memories of the three months at Interlochen Arts Camp. “We figured out that we sat next to each other. Larry was in my left ear in the same jazz band. I played tenor sax and he played alto sax. We were both joined by acne, big glasses, and blue corduroy pants and light blue polyester short-sleeved shirts with a big butterfly collar, the Interlochen uniform.” Days later, Krane was hired on as employee number 84. Today he is Google’s director of global communications and public affairs.
As the business took shape, the founders thought more and more about aesthetics. They wanted a home page that was both playful and uncluttered, so they hired a Stanford design teacher named Ruth Kedar. Her instructions, she recalled, were clear: “Google wanted to create a unique logo that would clearly differentiate them from the other search players at the time.... These other players were commercial portals first, and search engines second. Google wanted to convey that it was a search provider first and foremost.... Google as a brand should repudiate all things corporate, conventional or complacent.” The design was meant “to look almost non-designed, the reading effortless. The colors evoke memories of child play.”
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