Authors: Ken Auletta
Tags: #Industries, #Computer Industry, #Business & Economics
Googled (9 page)
Years later, Page and Brin demonstrated their playful irreverence. It was April 1, and the white space on the Google home page suddenly carried a line under the search box: “A Cool World: Enjoy a rosier future as a Virgle Pioneer.” When the link was opened, an invitation appeared to sign up for an “Adventure of Many Lifetimes.” The invitation read: “Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.” The site described the alleged deprivations, including low broadband rates and physical hardships and potential death. It was an April Fools’ joke.
The home page design, and a few glowing mentions about its search prowess in media like PC
Magazine,
generated some buzz about Google in the Valley. Ron Conway, the angel investor, recalled a reception attended by Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster, who had become a poster boy for the digital revolution. Brin and Page were unknowns and Conway remembers them approaching Fanning and saying, “What does it feel like to be on the cover of all those magazines?”
Magazine,
generated some buzz about Google in the Valley. Ron Conway, the angel investor, recalled a reception attended by Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster, who had become a poster boy for the digital revolution. Brin and Page were unknowns and Conway remembers them approaching Fanning and saying, “What does it feel like to be on the cover of all those magazines?”
“You guys have a really cool search product,” responded Fanning. “You’ll be more famous than I am!”
Danny Sullivan, a former reporter who left newspapers in 1996 to publish a Web newsletter called
Search Engine Watch
(now called
Search Engine Land
), and who is the closest approximation to an umpire in the search world, remembers the early buzz about Google. The initial search engines—AltaVista, Highbot, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, GoTo, Yahoo—were more interested in becoming “sticky portals” that trapped users on their sites, which diluted their focus on search. And when they performed a search, they were not impartial, allowing advertisers to buy their way to the top of the search results. Google, by contrast, “was really dedicated to search,” and refused to allow advertisers to distort the “science” of their search results.
Search Engine Watch
(now called
Search Engine Land
), and who is the closest approximation to an umpire in the search world, remembers the early buzz about Google. The initial search engines—AltaVista, Highbot, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, GoTo, Yahoo—were more interested in becoming “sticky portals” that trapped users on their sites, which diluted their focus on search. And when they performed a search, they were not impartial, allowing advertisers to buy their way to the top of the search results. Google, by contrast, “was really dedicated to search,” and refused to allow advertisers to distort the “science” of their search results.
Despite their young age—they were twenty-six-and the tight focus of their education, Brin and Page had extraordinary clarity about what search users might want. They rejected the conventional wisdom embraced by AOL and Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN to create portals and try to keep users in their walled garden with an array of content. They believed the right approach was to get users out of Google and to their search destination quickly. They rejected advertisers who wanted to place banner ads alongside search results, because the banners slowed results, were not intrinsic to search, and were a distraction. In the late nineties, when pop-up ads were the dominant way to advertise on the Web, the founders had the Google tool bar block them. They declined to place ads on their most valuable piece of real estate, the uncluttered opening Google page containing the search box.
Brin and Page resisted ads because they shared an allergy then common among Webheads and many folks who attended Burning Man: that advertising was like a rude stranger interrupting a conversation to sell you something you neither wanted nor needed. “These guys were opposed to advertising because they had a purist view of the world,” said Shriram. Like some Burning Man attendees, Page and Brin were—no other word will do—odd. Barry Diller, the CEO of the InterActiveCorp, a diverse collection of such e-commerce sites as Expedia and Ticketmaster, recalled visiting Page and Brin in the early days of Google. As they talked, Diller was disconcerted to see that Page did not lift his head from his PDA device; and Brin arrived late, on Rollerblades. “It’s one thing if you’re in a room with twenty people and someone is using their PDA,” Diller recalled. “I said to Larry, ‘Is this boring?’”
“No. I’m interested. I always do this,” said Page.
“Well, you can’t do this,” said Diller. “Choose.”
“I’ll do this,” said Page matter-of-factly, not lifting his eyes from his handheld device.
“So I talked to Sergey. I left thinking that more than most people they were wildly self-possessed.”
The founders may not have had a clue how to make money at Google, but they were clear that their mission was to build a great search engine and offer this search for free. Susan Wojcicki, the engineer who rented her garage to the founders and became employee number 18 and who later introduced her sister, Anne, to Brin, said the founders “were on a mission to build the best search engine,” and “early on understood that what mattered were users.” Their initial mission statement declared that they aimed “to organize the world’s information and make it universally acceptable.” This mission on its face was not as crassly commercial as Microsoft’s. Bill Gates’s quest was to put “a computer in every home and on every desk.” Each computer sold increased Microsoft’s dominance over the software market for the PC. Google’s missionary zeal, coupled with the fact that its search was free, cloaked its lust to also build a profit-making machine.
Building the machine, however, required capital. Relying mostly on original angel investors Shriram and Bechtolsheim for business advice, the founders decided early on to seek funding from more than one venture capital firm, so as not to rely on a single source of funds, and to assure their independence by selling no more than one-quarter of the company. They set out to recruit two of the most prominent VC firms in the Valley, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, whose senior partner John Doerr was a trained engineer who had helped fund such start-ups as Amazon, Netscape, and AOL, and Sequoia Capital, where Oxford-educated former
Time
magazine reporter Michael Moritz was a partner and an early backer of Yahoo and PayPal. Doerr remembers the meeting vividly. They met in the conference room next to his glassed office on Sand Hill Road. Page and Brin made a brief PowerPoint presentation to establish the most telling facts: by the end of 1998 they had indexed twenty-six million Web pages and were now doing half a million searches a day. Doerr was impressed. Instead of a long-winded explanation of their mission, Page and Brin made a high-concept pitch consisting of eight words: “We deliver the world’s information in one click.”
Time
magazine reporter Michael Moritz was a partner and an early backer of Yahoo and PayPal. Doerr remembers the meeting vividly. They met in the conference room next to his glassed office on Sand Hill Road. Page and Brin made a brief PowerPoint presentation to establish the most telling facts: by the end of 1998 they had indexed twenty-six million Web pages and were now doing half a million searches a day. Doerr was impressed. Instead of a long-winded explanation of their mission, Page and Brin made a high-concept pitch consisting of eight words: “We deliver the world’s information in one click.”
“I asked Page,” Doerr recalled, “‘how big will Google’s business be?’”
“Ten billion,” he said.
“Surely you mean market cap?” asked Doerr.
“No, revenue,” answered Page. He did not volunteer that they had no plausible revenue plan; instead he expressed faith that they would find a way to monetize their exploding search traffic. Pulling out a laptop, they demonstrated how much faster and more relevant a Google search was than those of other search engines.
“I almost fell out of my chair!” Doerr said. It was “one of the most extraordinary conversations I ever had in my life. I knew in that first meeting I wanted to invest in this business.” Page and Brin were similar to other founders he had funded—young men who had dropped out of school, who spoke quickly and were consumed by their work—but Doerr was struck by what he calls their audacity and singular focus. Doerr had been an investor in Excite, an early search engine, and had seen how the company lost focus as it chased becoming a portal. Moritz, too, was sold on Page and Brin’s “devotion to their dream. They were on a mission. We’ve learned over the years to pay close attention” to this kind of clarity. Besides, he added, “Their product was better.”
The plan was for Doerr and Moritz to sign a contract certifying that the two firms valued Google at $100 million and would invest a total of $25 million. There were some hitches, though. Each VC wanted to do the deal alone, but Page and Brin would not budge, insisting they do it together or not at all. And Doerr and Moritz were worried that Page (the CEO and chief financial officer) and Brin (the president and chairman of the board of directors) had between them roughly zero management experience; they wanted the founders to recruit professional managers. After protracted discussions, they finally reached a verbal agreement. “The understanding when we invested was that a CEO would, among others, be hired over time,” Moritz said. The founders would ignore this understanding, which later created some friction. They hit one other speed bump. While the parties were haggling, recalled Shriram, Brin phoned him and said he had met with another venture capital firm, one Shriram had earlier recommended. The VC told Brin that Google was worth $150 million, substantially more than the current estimate. “Should we do it?” Brin asked. Should they dump Doerr and Moritz in favor of the higher valuation?
“You’re already committed,” Shriram told Brin.
Nevertheless, Shriram recalled later with a smile, “Sergey mentioned this to Doerr and Moritz and it speeded up the process!” Brin, he said, is no Boy Scout, but rather a sly, dexterous deal maker: “I think of him as Kobe Bryant, a game changer.”
ON JUNE 7, 1999, Google issued its first press release announcing that Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia had invested twenty-five million dollars in Google. They also held their first press conference, in a small room in the Gates building at Stanford. Page and Brin, wearing white tennis shirts with the Google logo, sat at a Formica table flanked by Doerr, Shriram, and Moritz. Andy Bechtolsheim, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd sat in the audience with five reporters. As the journalists looked on, the founders gave a lengthy explanation of the technicalities of PageRank, their methods for indexing the Web and devising algorithms, their notions of “latency” and “scale,” and just about anything else they could think of.
At last a reporter asked the obvious question: How does Google plan to make money?
“Our goal,” Brin said, “is to maximize the search experience, not to maximize the revenues from search.”
At what appeared to be the conclusion of the press conference, Brin rose with a broadly smiling Page beside him and said, “If you want to ask more questions, fine.” He invited the reporters to stay and take a Google shirt and share refreshments. Unlike today, where their press appearances are not frequent and are treated, certainly by Page, as occasions to be endured, a home video of the press conference suggests that the two of them would happily have lingered all day.
Google’s next business breakthrough came later that same month. Omid Kordestani negotiated a deal with Netscape and its new corporate owner, AOL, to designate Google as the default search engine for the popular Netscape browser. The deal boosted Google searches to more than three million per day. “That was pretty exciting,” said Brin. “That was a big deal for us.” It was a major endorsement of Google. It was also a major test, bringing in huge numbers of searchers. “We got overwhelmed with traffic. It was our first big search engine crisis,” remembers Craig Silverstein. “We shut off
Google.com
that day to everyone but Netscape—till we could buy more computers!” They were burdened by another traffic jam, remembers senior software engineer Matt Cutts. When he joined the company in 1999, among his first tasks was to figure out how to block pornography searches, which accounted for one of every four queries. His solution was to assign a lesser weight in the Google algorithm to the words commonly used in porn searches, or for Google’s engineers to misspell the keywords in the Google index so the porn was difficult to retrieve. First he had to figure out the pertinent words. He spent hours poring over porn documents. Then his wife came up with the idea of baking cookies and awarding one “porn cookie” to each engineer who discovered a salacious keyword. Porn search traffic plummeted.
Google.com
that day to everyone but Netscape—till we could buy more computers!” They were burdened by another traffic jam, remembers senior software engineer Matt Cutts. When he joined the company in 1999, among his first tasks was to figure out how to block pornography searches, which accounted for one of every four queries. His solution was to assign a lesser weight in the Google algorithm to the words commonly used in porn searches, or for Google’s engineers to misspell the keywords in the Google index so the porn was difficult to retrieve. First he had to figure out the pertinent words. He spent hours poring over porn documents. Then his wife came up with the idea of baking cookies and awarding one “porn cookie” to each engineer who discovered a salacious keyword. Porn search traffic plummeted.
By the summer of 1999, Google was flush with cash and had outgrown the five-thousand-square-foot Palo Alto office, where forty employees now knocked knees when sitting at their desks. They needed to move, so Susan Wojcicki called in a real estate agent, who suggested the founders clear their schedules to visit possible sites. The founders thought this was a waste of their time. They knew what they wanted: to re-create the feel of the Stanford campus. Wojcicki remembers their saying to the agent, “Why don’t you go look at buildings and take some pictures and bring them back to us?”
In August, Google leased part of a two-story building rimmed by trees on Bayshore Boulevard in bucolic Mountain View. Initially, they rented the second floor but quickly expanded to the first, then to another building next door. It had obvious attractions: it was barely a ten-mile bike ride north to Stanford University, and in the distance to the west, the Santa Cruz Mountains formed a visible border. But unlike Palo Alto, where employees could walk to lunch, a meal in Mountain View required driving. The offices quickly became littered with pizza boxes and Chinese-food containers. The founders decided they’d need a chef. They’d select one in the same way fraternities and sororities at Stanford did: by having a Chef Audition Week. One chef, Charlie Ayers, “blew everyone away” with his array of “gourmet comfort food—like spaghetti and meatballs,” said Marissa Mayer. (It helped that Ayers was the former chef for the Grateful Dead.) He was hired in November to supervise the preparation of favorites like pizza and hamburgers, and also what he called big-ass barbecues, as well as vegetarian stir-fry, salads with lush tomatoes and fresh vegetables, carved turkey, fiery chili, lamb chops, steak, and generous slabs of sushi, to which he affixed an attractive New Age explanation: “The fat found in fish helps make the cell membranes round the brain more elastic and more able to absorb nutrients easily”
In addition to free food, the founders signed off on an abundance of other amenities that made venture capitalists uneasy. “I think they were a little bit perturbed to see the front-page stories in the San Jose Mercury News that we were hiring a chef and a masseuse,” Brin concedes. “But I think the actual economic and productivity outcome of this they grew pretty quickly to accept. They just didn’t think we should be known for that [profligacy].” He explained how he and Page approach free food and employee benefits: “A lot of it is common sense, a combination of common sense and questioning rituals.” Generous benefits help recruit and retain employees, he said. Compelling employees to drive for meals, and find parking “would be a real productivity sink ... and they’d probably not eat healthy food.” Besides, he added, waiting in line to pay would waste more time.
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