I'm Feeling Lucky (30 page)

Coincidentally or not, within days the dynamic homepage coding was completed. In theory, anyway. We still needed a script so webmaster Karen could run the program on her Windows machine. That took several more weeks. Then the logs team had problems extracting the user data we needed. The first actual report wasn't ready until November.

I never believed that my engineering colleagues were intentionally neglecting my number one priority. Any of a thousand projects competing for their attention could legitimately take precedence over a marketing request. And as hard as Larry and Sergey rode marketing, they rode the engineers harder. The founders were engineers, after all, and they understood what engineers could do. They just didn't understand why our engineers weren't doing it faster, and they let them know so.

The feedback to our group was more ambiguous.

"Marketing should be less risk averse," Larry said.

"And more creative," Sergey added.

"And more productive," they concluded.

Cindy kept us informed when marketing's inability to make things happen was a topic for discussion at the executive level. It seemed to come up frequently.

"Don't let anything hold you up for eventual delivery," Cindy wrote in my six-month review. "Figure out the fastest way to get it done. And don't let your signature high standards slip!"

"Absolutely," I assured her. But without engineering support, some things just weren't going to happen, and support from engineering only came when a project was endorsed by Larry or Sergey. Negotiating personal relationships to gain their blessing added a complicating factor.

Google was a company that enforced closeness more than most, from overpopulated workspaces to shared meals to all-company ski trips to constant electronic accessibility twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We saw a lot of one another and often became good friends—but close quarters also drove people apart. Peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies became inescapable irritants. Privacy was hard to come by, and personal hygiene took on added importance. There were undercurrents of annoyance and avoidance and sometimes overt expressions of exasperation as the pressure to perform intensified. In the midst of all that, people fell in love and out of love, formed lifelong bonds and ended their marriages. For some, Google became more a lifestyle than an employer.

I liked coming to work. I liked my job. I liked the challenges. I liked the energy, and I liked my coworkers—with whom I was spending more hours than with my family. But for me the Googleplex was just a place to get things done. I was a forty-one-year-old man, married, with three kids, two cars, a cat, and a mortgage. I already had a home.

S
ERGEY SAT WITH
Susan in the front of the aluminum canoe I was steering down the Russian River in Sonoma County. It was September 2000, and I was using all the navigational skills I had picked up at sleep-away camp to keep us clear of rocks and overhanging branches. Around us other Googlers fired super soakers and shouted gleefully when someone ran aground or capsized.

"paddle closer to Larry's canoe," Sergey urged me as he stripped off his shirt and positioned himself near the side. In an instant, he was out of the canoe and swimming toward his co-founder, grabbing for the gunwale of his boat—splashing and rocking it as if to tip it over—before heading off to attack one of the other engineers.

When we reached the last sandbar two hours later, Larry was waiting to take his revenge. While I pulled the canoe up onto the beach, he came running toward us through the shallow water.

"Hah," I thought. "Sergey's going down."

I was caught totally by surprise when Larry bypassed Sergey and tackled me instead, sending me sprawling into the water. I had never been subjected to a physical attack by a manager before. It was the kind of rambunctious roughhousing I associated with adolescent boys. I came out of the water smiling. The canoe trip was intended to forge closer ties among Googlers and to break us out of our crusty cubicle-enclosed lives. It was company-mandated fun, but it was fun.

I may have given the impression to this point that Google was a relentless pressure cooker in which we gave every ounce of sweat and passion to advance the greater good envisioned by our brilliant, demanding founders. That's pretty accurate. A very pregnant project manager—overcome by exhaustion—apologized to me for not answering an email I sent her after midnight. She shamefacedly admitted she had fallen asleep. However, Google was also a great place to hang out, filled with interesting people who were physically active and quick of wit.

"I want Urs for my boat," engineer John Bauer punned when we were choosing canoe-trip buddies. "I can't row without him."

"Unfortunately the root is defunct now," Jeremy Chau nerdily joked about a tree that fell in the parking lot. "Should we take a look at the log?"

We held an employee contest to guess the first day we would do a hundred million searches, with the winner riding away on a new electric scooter. We had a spring-cleaning ice-cream social and a flood of geeky jokes. ("How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?" "None. They just declare Darkness™ the standard.")

When Karen took a vacation, we ordered a thousand plastic playground balls and filled her cube with them. They were still being thrown from office to office and rolling around under desks a year later.

For Mardi Gras, Charlie adorned the café with beads and cooked little plastic babies into king cakes. On Cinco de Mayo we tasted crawfish and sweet potato tamales washed down with horchata and sweet sangria.

For Halloween we had blood-clot punch with life-sized baby dolls floating in the bowl (Charlie had a fetish for food garnished with infants) and a parade of tasteless costumes including choirboys with sinner priests, bloodied plane-wreck casualties, and oozing shark-bite victims—and those were just the outfits worn by our not-so-politically-correct HR manager, Heather.

And we had groupies. Tourists in Linux t-shirts took souvenir photos under the Google sign by our front door—proof that Yahoo had put us on the map and that our brand was striking a chord deeper than that of a typical tech company.

It seemed I merely had to stand up and walk a few paces away from my chair in any direction to experience something new and entertaining.

"Cock rings? I overheard one sales rep ask another as I passed her cube. "How many of those do we have? And vibrators? How many can we come up with for that?"

"There must be a supply cabinet I don't know about," I thought. "Or perhaps I forgot to sign up for the mailing list about after-work parties."

Adult services advertisers, I learned when I asked, were among our earliest customers. They needed to know how many ad impressions we could deliver targeted to the words that defined their businesses. The sales reps had been checking the "inventory" of projected searches for those keywords. Google was not the place to work if you had delicate sensibilities.

The lighter moments helped make the load bearable, but it was the boldness of our business initiatives that really got my blood flowing and kept me from feeling trapped in a thankless grind. I never knew when some fastball would smack me in the head and reset my thinking yet again.

"What the hell are you thinking?" I asked Larry when he explained his idea for a new do-it-yourself advertising system.

The engineers had continued to innovate on our initial CPM ad system, beginning with placing ads on the right-hand side of search results in addition to those at the top of the page. The next step, Larry informed us, would be a feature that made it possible for anyone to create right-hand-side ads and post them live on Google within minutes. We would have guidelines and terms and conditions, but we would start running ads before verifying they were in compliance. In effect, anyone with a valid credit card could make an ad that said anything.

Anyone. Anything.

"How in the world is our brand going to survive racist, pornographic, and defamatory ads?" I protested. "They're bound to show up on our results pages. Do we want our brand to be associated with hate speech and worse? I have a very bad feeling about this."

Larry's decision to let user-created ads go live on our site without review convinced me he occupied some alternative and severely distorted reality. To allow the publication of unscreened ads was a classic marketing crisis in the making. Any fool could see that. Evidently, I was that fool.

Others shared my incredulity. One engineer was so appalled by the plan that he considered writing a letter to the VCs on the board informing them we were about to lose all the money they had invested in us. Chad Lester—the omnivore engineer—however, celebrated our founder's risk tolerance.

"I was excited about it," Chad told me after the fact. "It was like high school and TP-ing someone's house. Why not try it and see what happens?"

I'd seen managers build consensus before moving ahead with unpopular decisions, and I knew bosses who dipped their toes in untested waters, fully prepared to pull out quickly if the temperature rose above or dropped below their comfort level. This was a different kind of leadership. Larry was so suffused with conviction that he simply brushed aside opposition and ran toward risk without fear or hesitation. He was absolutely convinced that unfiltered ads were the right thing to do.

In retrospect, Larry's and Chad's zeal may reflect the difference in our stages of life. I was a middle-aged father with a lot to lose if Google died on the vine. Chad and Larry were just beginning their careers. They could afford to flame out in Silicon Valley, where bold failures earn more respect than incremental success.

Not all mid-life guys are too conservative to survive startups, but to be successful you have to love uncertainty the way Chad loved pork chops. You need enormous reserves of energy to undertake everything thrown your way—along with the confidence to bounce back each time you fall off the high wire and hit the ground hard. I had moved to Nagoya before I could speak Japanese and to Novosibirsk without a word of Russian. I'd jumped from a steady job at the
Merc
to an unsecured position in an unknown company without a safety net. I didn't fear the unknown. Neither did I want to see my brave new world implode because of reckless, ill-considered decisions. I found it increasingly difficult to judge what fell into that category.

There were people my age at Google when I joined and people older than me within a few months. Hardware designer Will Whitted had been fifty-four when he started, and he saw no gap between his thought process and that of his younger colleagues. "I think that I think younger, which probably means more irresponsibly, than most people do," he confessed. "There were people at Google who had the opposite problem—who were a little younger than me, but perceived by people who mattered to be old-thinking. To be slow and overly conservative, and it got them in trouble."

Those who succeeded, as I was trying to do, needed to be open to new ideas regardless of their source or seeming defiance of logic.

It's hard to accept that everything you know is wrong, or at least needs to be proved right all over again. Larry's decision to run unscreened ads opened the scab over my opposition to messing with our logo. It tested my resolve to adopt a wide perspective—to see the panorama of opportunity opening for us, rather than the walls fencing us in. If Google were filled only with people who shared a "big-company" perspective on reducing risks, we would never reap the rare fruits that flourished only in environmental extremes.

Larry had decided. We would launch our new do-it-yourself ad program in late 2000. Now we began debating what to call it. "AdsToo" was engineering's working name (it was version two of the ads system and engineers are very literal people). No one wanted that to become the permanent moniker.

Since no one person or department owned product identity, the process got messy. Larry wanted a name that didn't sound funny if you said it five times fast. Omid wanted separation between the Google name and the name of the ad product (so no "Googlads"). Those were the only guidelines. Suggestions flew in from all quarters, each beloved by its originator and endorsed by odd lots of others.

Salar supported "prestoAds" before deciding it was too seventies. He switched his allegiance to "Self-serve Ads," which clearly described the product's unique feature.

"AdsDirect" had Susan's support.

I proposed "GIDYAP" (Google's Interactive Do-It-Yourself Ad Program). Everyone immediately barfed all over it. I tried "BuyWords" next: a play on "bywords" (words to live by) and "buy words." The sales team allowed that they could dance to that, and Bart agreed the name was catchy. Larry gave it his blessing.

"All done," I thought, once again mistaking consensus for final approval.

Then the lobbying began.

Salar pointed out that the keyword-targeting concept was relatively new and we wanted a name that made clear how it worked. BuyWords might imply that we were selling placement in our actual search results, rather than just ads next to the results. Still, he liked BuyWords better than AdsDirect, which I argued was too generic and evocative of old-fashioned direct mail.