I'm Feeling Lucky (21 page)

NYU professor Ken Perlin created a bouncing heart applet for Valentine's Day and a bouncing-bunny game for Easter. Larry showed his gratitude with an offer of Google stock sufficient to make the code Ken sent us, line for line, quite possibly the most expensive ever written.

Our users loved the randomness of the logo artwork and sent us dozens of appreciative emails. Google's brilliant strategy of humanizing an otherwise sterile interface with cute little cartoon creatures was an enormous hit—and as the company's online brand manager, the person responsible for building Google's awareness and brand equity, I had opposed it as adamantly as I could. Yes, if it had been left to me, there would be no Google Doodles at all; just our cold stiff logo lying in state, wrapped in a sheet of pristine white pixels.

It was so blindingly obvious (to me) that I was right, yet I was so clearly wrong. Google did that to you—made you challenge all your assumptions and experience-based beliefs until you began to wonder if up was really up, or if it might not actually be a different kind of down.

Larry's Rules of Order:

• Don't delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.
  
• Don't get in the way if you're not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else. Don't be a bureaucrat.
  
• Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is junior doesn't mean they don't deserve respect and cooperation.
  
• The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, "No. Period." If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.
  

Larry wouldn't enunciate this brief set of principles until 2004. Even if I'd had them on day one, it would have taken a while to reprogram my operating system to accept them. I happened to be really good at saying no.

All my previous jobs had inculcated in me the conviction that bad ideas, like termites, must be exterminated before they could gnaw away at our core business. If a proposal didn't arrive chained to a rock-solid guarantee of success reinforced with a five-year projection, breakeven points, and upward-trending arrows, it was a bad idea.

At the
Merc
I learned that the presumptive answer was always no, as in "If no one in authority tells you to do it, don't." At Google that answer was supposed to be yes. You should take initiative, though it was never clear how far you could go on your own.

Larry and Sergey had never worked in a company where they were taught otherwise—say a company that had been recording past events on the pulped remains of dead trees for a century and a half. So I needed to stop saying "Here's my concern," and start saying "Here's what you need to do to make that happen."

Sergey gave me an opportunity when he dynamited the dam of my resistance and homepage logos came pouring through. If I couldn't stop them, at least I could divert them from sweeping away the brand equity we had already built.

Karen White was the webmaster, and the webmaster had responsibility for the homepage. The webmaster also constituted one-half of the online brand group reporting to me. Karen would decorate the logos when we didn't have outside help.

About the time Ian Marsden's first Doodle ran, Karen hired an intern to help with updating the website. The intern, Dennis Hwang, was majoring in art and computer science and had helped with graphics for the gator-gone-wild horror flick
Lake Placid
("You'll never know what bit you"). During his interview Dennis mentioned that on his last job he had volunteered to work thirty-hour weekend shifts without pay. That got our attention. And he could draw. Over the next year, we gave Dennis responsibility for decorating the logo and we stopped using contractors. Why pay for milk when you own a cow?

"Hey, tomorrow is election day! What are we doing for a logo?" a curious engineer would ask Karen or Dennis or me over dinner.

"Oh, something really cool. You'll see," we would answer. Then we would go back to our cubes and discuss whether we actually were going to do a logo for election day. For the first couple of years, that was the carefully structured process by which we instigated homepage alterations. If we decided to go ahead, Dennis would get to work, churning out one idea after another. Dennis never slept. In the still of the night, his stylus danced over the drawing pad connected to his computer, and by the time the morning dawned, a new logo was ready to adorn the site. One of the few decorations we actually planned in advance was Mother's Day 2000. To prove that Google wasn't composed entirely of metal and wiring attached to positronic brains, I suggested we collect photos of moms from our coworkers and arrange them around the old poem spelling out "What Mother Means to Me." Straight out of the Hallmark emotional-manipulation handbook. We were so inundated with fan mail I became verklempt.

"Your mothers must be
so
proud," a user told us. "I want my son to work at Google."

We received more letters of praise when we did the same thing the following year, but we also received pointed questions about why there weren't any African-American moms depicted. We answered that not all staff members were represented—but it was the last time our mothers put in an appearance.

Sometimes the artwork itself misfired. "Why do you have a turkey, a turtle, and a thermometer on your logo?" users asked when Dennis celebrated the Japanese holiday Shichi-Go-San with a crane, a turtle, and a traditional candy bag.

"Why does King Neptune have a boner?" Several users noted an unfortunate tenting in Poseidon's toga during a logo series Dennis did for the Olympics that featured figures from Greek mythology.

"Your anti-Christian political correctness is showing." "Your hemisphericentric world view is apparent." We heard both these complaints about the snowy "winter holiday" scenes we ran instead of Christmas-specific artwork. Australians in particular wanted to make it very plain to us that December is the middle of their summer and hence winter scenes on our homepage made us look uninformed, uncaring, or both.

"Where's your patriotism?" other users demanded. "You celebrate Chinese New Year, but not [pick one]: Memorial Day, Veterans Day, D-Day, V-J Day, Presidents' Day." We wanted the logos to be unpredictable and special, but eventually they took on a life of their own with a complicated set of rules governing what we would commemorate and whom we would honor. That came later. For the first couple of years, Dennis and Karen and I had free rein to pick and choose, which is why Korean Liberation Day made the list twice before Australia Day. Yo, Dennis—represent, Seoul brother.

"Do you know what our greatest corporate expense is?" Sergey asked at TGIF. The assembled Googlers looked up from their laptops. Everyone wanted the chance to be right in front of others.

"Health insurance!" shouted an engineer. "Salaries!" "Servers!" "Taxes!" "Electricity!" "Charlie's grocery bills!" rejoined others.

"No," said Sergey, shaking his head solemnly. "Opportunity cost."

Products we weren't launching and deals we weren't doing threatened our economic stability far more than any single line item in the budget. We were falling behind even as we leapt ahead. Success was spilling through our fingers. This was Sergey's rallying cry to redouble our efforts. I heard it, but sometimes I had a hard time answering.

After six months on the job, I had plenty on my plate, and I swept away my daily tasks like an umpire brushing away the dust of a home-bound slide. Big amorphous projects, though, like reorganizing all the corporate information pages or developing a banner-ad strategy for our trade partners, I just couldn't find time to complete.

If I wasn't responding to coworker requests, sitting in meetings, or flicking my mouse at emails infesting my inbox, I was being seduced by the rustle of M&Ms each time someone dipped a scoop into the bin across the hall. Kitchen aromas suffused my senses until I was compelled to pore over the lunch menu and plan my noon repast. There was always someone up for after-dinner
Soul Calibur
in the Blue Room, and the sauna beckoned when the pressure got intense—I could think about all the tasks piling up on my desk as freshly made Italian coffee dripped out of my pores.

At the
Merc,
I had never felt a pang when making personal calls on my office phone, because, I mean, just look at the dearth of perks they offered. A discounted subscription to our own newspaper? Gee. Thanks. At Google, I was in worker's paradise, but I felt I didn't deserve it. I was putting in way more hours than I had at the
Merc,
but it never seemed enough to justify the bounty the company was bestowing upon me. As dot-coms slipped into insolvency all around us, I was constantly reminded how lucky I was, not only to have a job, but to have such a great job. Survivor's guilt tormented me. Yes, I was cranking out great volumes of material, but I wasn't pushing us quickly enough toward a global marketing strategy. Cindy knew it. She made it clear she wanted more urgency, more big ideas, more leadership from me. She was right: I could, I
should
do more. My days stretched longer. I hung around in the dark (but hardly empty) Googleplex forcing myself to
be productive.
Was I the only one feeling this insecure?

"I don't know if I can last here a year," search-quality guru Ben Gomes thought to himself after starting his first hard assignment. "I hope I can make it. I want to reach my vesting cliff." Gomes survived. "A few months later I started working on ranking," he recalls. "I was here till four a.m. and coming back at ten in the morning. My entire life was here. It was
great.
I really enjoyed it."
^*

The hours and the intensity fostered a sense of camaraderie among the night shift, especially when Larry and Sergey held court in their offices. They were so much easier to spot in the moonlight, stripped of the protective cover provided by blocked-out calendars. Meetings devoured daylight, but seven p.m. opened broad vistas of uninterrupted uptime. I could brew a fifth cup of coffee and face down the monstrosities lurking in forsaken corners of my to-do list. But first...

"Daddy? When are you coming home, Daddy?" one of the kids would croon as soon as I called the house. "I miss you and I want to see you." Kristen wasn't above fighting dirty in the war for my attention. "I love you Daaaddy."

How could I blame her? While I snuggled in the bosom of my new Google family, she picked up the parental duties I shirked. Playing pattycake, making macaroni, kissing boo-boos, and keeping the roof securely fastened on our little bungalow next door to a guy doing home-based auto repairs. All while lecturing local college students on Russian avant-garde cinema and Persian poetry of the thirteenth century.

My previous jobs had been in public broadcasting and newspapers, both infamous for obscenely inflated compensation packages, so money was never an issue unless we needed to buy something. Kristen didn't play the martyr, though I could discern her doubts.

"He was just ready to try something new," I heard her tell a friend on the phone. "It's Google. No. Goo-gle. Gooooo-gle. Like a baby sucking a pacifier. Yes, it's a real company. Well, not as real as the newspaper was..."

The feeling that I was failing at home while underachieving in a spectacular way at work shook me. There were so many things I
could
be doing better in both places that I started parsing my schedule into thirty-second segments and communicating in sentence fragments.

"Adam! Out of bed, dressed, and ready to go in ninety seconds." Adam was eleven. "Nathaniel. Bathroom? Socks and shoes in the car. Pants too." Nathaniel was six. "Avalon. Diapee?" Avalon was one.

Surprisingly, children are not onboard with that mode of interaction. I had to force myself to remember that the goal of being a father is not to download a set of instructions, check for understanding, and then move on to the next task on an endless list.

Meanwhile, status requests showed up in my inbox at midnight asking about assignments handed out five hours earlier. Instant messages arrived minutes later.

"Just wondering. Where are you with the text for the browser buttons? We need to check in the code in an hour."

If one task fell behind schedule, the project circling behind would sink lower and lower until it slid to a fiery end on a foam-covered runway. I wanted to take the time to do everything right—polish the prose and perfect the text, double-check the targeting, and drop it precisely on the intended audience. The engineers wanted to shove stuff out the window when it was still a mile away from where it should be.

"Good enough is good enough" was the standard Urs set for engineering. In those five words he encapsulated a philosophy for solving problems, cutting through complexity, and embracing failure. It should be stitched into the fabric of every cubicle at Google. It drove Google's software development, the heart and soul of the company's technology.

"When you have a list that's longer than you can deal with, you have to prioritize," Urs instructed us. "If you give a project a quick improvement that gets you eighty percent of the way to solving the problem, you haven't solved it, but it drops below the line versus one you haven't worked on at all." And then he put his finger on the crux of my conflicts with engineering. "Once a problem falls below the line you should work on something else, even though it's not finished."

How the hell could I stop working on something when it wasn't finished? The whole world would see scratches in our metal-flake paint and dings in the door panels of our corporate identity. The shame!