I'm Feeling Lucky (3 page)

When it was over, Yahoo offered me a low-level position, a salary I couldn't live on, and the prestige of a purple badge. I politely declined, shook hands, and left. I was way too late for Yahoo.

I didn't give up.

I had been swept away by tales of a new legion of dot-com heroes and had happily contributed fables to the frenzy. Our ads for the
Mercury News
online service asked, "Why wait 'til you're twenty-seven to make your first million?" and urged executives to "Find out when your mailroom guy is going public." I embraced the hype. At night I murmured into my pillow that we needed to "win mind share" and "go big fast."

The dot-com energy in the Valley vibrated at a frequency visible everywhere, overwhelming and electrifying and so intoxicating that whole cities became drunk on it. High-tech gold was all around us; you could feel the weight of it displacing rationality. Houses sold overnight for a million dollars above the asking price, paid in cash. Lamborghinis and Ferraris zipped past the Beamers and Benzes cruising Highway 280. Elvis Costello jammed at company parties and private fireworks displays lit up backyard barbeques.

I invested my minimal savings in companies I read about in
Red Herring
and the
Industry Standard:
JDS Uniphase and NetGravity and DoubleClick. I watched their value soar and became convinced I was a keen analyst of the burgeoning Internet economy. Relatives turned to me for stock tips and I began pontificating on the future of XML and push media as if I actually knew what I was talking about.

The millennium was ending and maybe civilization too. Y2K was almost here. A software bug would cause computer clocks to fail, and planes would fall from the sky. The power grid would shut down and cities go dark. Better day trade while the lights were still on.

The next big thing was out there, lurking in a renovated warehouse in San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch or hanging around in a rented one-room office, sharing utilities and a blackened Mr. Coffee machine with other aspiring successes. Brilliant schemes were cooking up like idea popcorn. Most died quietly; half-baked, warmed over, unpalatable. But occasionally one would explode into a wild success and the Valley would come running, throwing business cards and venture capital at the new marvel of fluff and air.

I talked to anyone who had a business plan with "Internet" scrawled in crayon across the top and enough backing to cover my salary for a month, from iTix and Bits2Go to AllBusiness and NexTag. I talked with Sinanet though every word on their site was in Chinese. I begged for an interview at InsWeb, a company offering insurance over the Internet, because somehow it didn't sound lame to say "I sell auto coverage" if you could add the magic word "online."

I lowered my standards and flung out another dozen résumés in hopes of locating a landing place, even aiming one at the little startup that had been part of our
Siliconvalley.com
store—what was it called? Oh yeah, "Google." It was likely a waste of buff-colored stationery and a thirty-three-cent stamp, because I was looking for the next big thing and I was pretty sure they weren't it. Search was so 1997.

Still, since I'd sent Google a résumé, I figured I should give their product a try. I went to their site and entered the name of a girl I'd known in high school but hadn't heard from in twenty years. Even AltaVista, which I viewed as the best search engine available, had never found a trace of her, so my expectations were low when I hit the enter key.

And there she was.

Google listed her current contact information as the first result. I tried more searches. They all worked better than they had on AltaVista. I no longer begrudged Google the stationery and the stamp.

Other signs pointed to something out of the ordinary. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins were the Montagues and Capulets of Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) firms. They had enviable success records individually—Yahoo, Amazon, Apple, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems—and an intense rivalry that usually kept them from investing in the same startup. Yet together they had poured twenty-five million dollars into the fledgling company. What did Google possess that induced them to set aside their ancient grudge?

I looked for clues in the bios of Google's founders and management team. An abundance of Stanford grads and advanced degrees, which wasn't uncommon. But members of Stanford's faculty had even invested their own money in the new venture—that was different. I didn't know diddly about search technology, but people who presumably did seemed to think Google had potential. When you're burning with startup fever, it doesn't take much to feed the visions playing in your head. So when Google agreed to interview me, I printed out some fresh résumés, tossed my briefcase in our old Taurus, and headed north to Mountain View to check out the new frontier.

How does one interview for a job at a startup in Silicon Valley? I was well practiced by the time I pulled into Google's parking lot. It was another warm Bay Area November, and I wasn't surprised to see one section of the asphalt roped off with police tape and a roller hockey net at each end. The beige building and a herd of others just like it grazed in verdant fields interspersed with tasteful fountains and ambiguous sculptures. When I entered the first floor of the building, there were arrows printed on copy paper pointing the way to the stairs, which I followed to the second floor.

The curly-haired young receptionist smiled at me. I looked at her and recalled tales of secretaries walking off with millions from early stock options. Would she be one of them? She guided me to a small room decorated with a nine-foot whiteboard, a standard-issue circular table, and several inflated rubber balls large enough to sit on. Nothing here suggested rivers of currency dammed and waiting to burst forth in a torrential IPO. It was just a conference room in a generic office building on a lazy late-autumn afternoon. As I sat idly patting a three-foot ball, a number of folks on the business side of the company straggled in and introduced themselves.

Susan Wojcicki, who owned the garage that had been Google's first headquarters, had left Intel to join her tenants' company as a marketing manager. Cindy McCaffrey had come over from Apple to be director of public relations. Together they walked me through a general introduction to Google with the sort of positive energy that bubbled over everywhere in those days. At least they had facts on which to build their optimism.
Time
had written up the site, traffic was growing by leaps and bounds, and Google had ample financial backing, though no immediate source of revenue. That would come in time, they assured me. They asked about my experience, especially with viral marketing, which Cindy indicated was important to the company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

"Oh sure, I've done viral," I assured them, whipping through my bulging portfolio to show them the "Nerd for the New Millennium" contest I'd worked up with the Tech Museum and the oval
SV.com
stickers the
Merc
had sent local venture capitalists to stick on their Porsches. It wasn't exactly "viral," but it was what I had.

They were equally orthogonal in answering my questions about Google's business model and corporate structure.

"Right now we license search technology," Susan informed me, "but we've got some other things in the works."

"We have a very flat organization," Cindy said. "We don't have very clearly defined roles, and everyone does everything."

I smiled and nodded to indicate that this made perfect sense to me, thanked them, and said it sounded as if Google had a marvelous future.

As the Taurus crept home along Highway 101, I turned up the radio and sang along. I had the impression that Cindy and Susan were interested and would call me back. That was a relief after so many months of throwing in my line and netting nothing. I felt my luck was turning. I had been hungry for a long time and now scented an opportunity I could really sink my teeth into.

Two days later, Leesa, the Google recruiter, called me back. Could I meet with more members of the staff? I could and I did. Scott Epstein, the interim VP of sales, wished me good luck. He was phasing out after proposing Google spend millions on an ad campaign—an idea that didn't sit well with Larry and Sergey. Urs Hölzle, Google's head of engineering, greeted me warmly and advised me not to lie on the floor and act like a chew toy near Yoshka, the wooly mammoth noisily slurping water from a bowl behind him.
^*
Omid Kordestani, the newly hired head of sales and business development, forgave me for trash-talking AOL even though he had worked there.

Afterward, Cindy took me back to the conference room to wait for Sergey. I wasn't nervous. Sergey was about the age of my favorite t-shirt and a Russian by birth. I had lived in Russia and spoke some Russian. I had Russian friends and embraced their dark humor, their cynical views, and their sarcastic ways. I felt unusually confident that the interview would go well. Perhaps Sergey was seeking a mentor? I pictured us toasting our success and each other's health with fine Siberian vodka.

Sergey showed up wearing roller hockey gear: gym shorts, a t-shirt, and inline skates. He had obviously been playing hard. I had known better than to wear a tie, but he took office casual to a new level.
^†
I sat back and resumed toying with one of the rubber balls, feeling so relaxed that I accidentally removed its stopper, causing half the air inside to rush out with a hiss. Sergey found that amusing. He pored over my résumé and began peppering me with questions. "What promotion did you do that was most effective?" "What metrics did you use to measure it?" "What types of viral marketing did you do?" "What was your GPA?" I was doing fine until that last one. I just looked at him.

"My GPA?" I hadn't thought about my grade point average since the day they handed me my diploma in 1981. And given that my alma mater had allowed me to take as many classes as I wanted with a pass/fail option, I'm not sure I ever knew what my GPA was. I laughed, thinking Sergey was joking, but even after the company offered me a job, the HR people kept pestering me for a college transcript and my SAT scores. It was a classic Google moment. Your SAT score was the measure of your intellectual capability; your GPA represented your ability to execute on that potential. The value of your future contribution to Google could be plotted using just those two data points.

Sergey's desire to reduce every decision to an equation would cause me a fair amount of frustration in the years to come. While it forced me to discipline my thinking, it also went against my deeply held conviction that some things are not expressible with an algorithm, no matter how carefully derived.

"How much do you think a company our size should spend on marketing?" Sergey asked me. From his earlier questions, it was easy to guess what he wanted to hear.

"I don't think at this stage you should spend much at all," I said. "You can get good exposure with viral marketing and small budgets. Shooting gerbils out of a cannon in a Superbowl spot
^*
is not a very effective strategy for building a brand."

Sergey nodded his agreement, then asked about my six months in Siberia, casually switching to Russian to see how much I had picked up. Finally, he leaned forward and fired his best shot, what he came to call "the hard question." "I'm going to give you five minutes," he announced. "When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know." He then rolled out of the room toward the snack area.

I looked at Cindy. "He's very curious about everything," she said. "You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it's something you understand really well."

I reached for a piece of scrap paper as my mind raced. What complicated thing did I know well enough to describe to Sergey? Diaper changing didn't seem appropriate. How newspapers are printed? Kind of dull. I decided to go with the general theory of marketing, which was fresh in my mind because I'd only learned it recently.

One of my dirty little secrets was a complete lack of academic preparation for the business world. Instead of statistics and economics, I'd taken planetary geology, Latin, and Spenserian verse. Fortunately, Annie Skeet, my boss at the
Mercury News,
had a Harvard MBA and a desire to drive some business theory into my thick skull. She had given me a stack of her old textbooks along with strong hints that I should read them. I had found a couple of titles interesting, including Michael Porter's
Competitive Strategy
and David Aaker's books on branding.

I began regurgitating everything I could remember onto the paper in front of me: the five P's (or was it six?), the four M's, barriers to entry, differentiation on quality or price. By the time Sergey came back, I had enough to talk for ten minutes and was confident I could fill any holes with the three B's (Buckets of Baffling Bullshit). I went to the whiteboard and furiously drew circles and squares and unleashed arrows like Legolas. I was nervous, but not very. Sergey bounced on a ball and asked questions that required me to make things up on the spot.

"What's the most effective barrier to entry?"

"What's more important: product differentiation or promotion?"

"How does the strategy change if the price is zero?"

He seemed to be paying attention, and I began enjoying myself. We were developing a special rapport! Clearly, he wanted to hear what I had to say and valued my opinions. Later I found out that Sergey did this with everyone he interviewed. An hour wasted with an unqualified candidate wasn't a total loss if he gained insight into something new.