I'm Feeling Lucky (9 page)

I flipped through the slides, but there wasn't much more than a broad outline of Google's management team, a list of competitors, some market share numbers, a budget, and a slide that read, "What's the secret to Google? 4+ years of R&D at Stanford and
Google.com
+ Highly skilled team." That really cleared things up.

"When I tried to put in more detail, they didn't want to share anything," Salar explained when I asked about the thinking behind the skimpy content. Pulling together the slides had been his first task upon joining the company. Larry and Sergey knew that some of the firms they were pitching already had investments in competing search engines, and they had no intention of giving away their good ideas.

"That made the presentation kind of dry," Salar went on, "so Sergey's solution was to annotate it with clip art the night before our first meeting." I tried to picture the power brokers of Silicon Valley intently pondering an investment of ten million dollars as cheesy money trees and sparkling dollar signs sprouted around Google's potential revenue streams (sales of technology and targeted advertising). Then I imagined their reaction to Google's aggressive traffic projections, which showed the company conducting fifty percent of all Internet searches within two years. Even in Silicon Valley, nobody grew that fast.

In 1999, you would have needed uncanny foresight or powerful pharmaceuticals to envision Google's future success. Or maybe just money to burn. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia must have had something, because the two VC firms invested twelve and a half million dollars each, leading cynics in the Valley to define "Googling" as "getting funding without a business plan."
^*

The slide deck said nothing about marketing Google, so my plan would start from scratch. I drew a pyramid chart showing a hierarchy of users, with "tech savvy" at the top and "newbies" at the bottom, and outlined a three-phase program to move us through all the stages in between. I asked questions for which we had no answers. What was the size of the tech-savvy market? Had we already won the majority of it? Would we need new products to appeal to less sophisticated users? Research could tell us that, but meanwhile I offered ideas about making proprietary legal databases and domain-registration records searchable and launching a Google Fellows program to reward dedicated users. I felt confident sending the plan to our executive staff. It contained no proposal to spend big on mainstream media and instead emphasized the importance of gathering data. Larry and Sergey seemed to like data.

"Great job," Sergey responded. "This is a good starting place." True, he disputed most of my supporting arguments, but he administered no gut shot that left my plan writhing on the floor spilling its insights. Larry was more reserved, but he liked the questions I was asking and thought the idea of Google Fellows was "cool."
^†

Sergey quibbled with my assertion that speed would not be an important differentiator as everyone moved to broadband connections. "Speed is an issue for me," he said, "and I have a cable modem at home. If search engines were faster and better, they could be integrated into your thought process." He saw Google becoming an invisible component in every user's decision-making, not just a tool for finding a particular fact. Apparently "brain integration" was one of our hitherto undisclosed corporate goals.

He also discounted my conclusion that we needed to add targeted services to steal page views away from the big portals. "Nonfunctionality is a feature," he instructed me. "We don't need to increase page views by adding products." Larry and Sergey always thought in terms of scale. Sergey saw that there was a far greater gap between the total numbers of users visiting each portal than there was between the numbers of pages visitors viewed once they were at a portal. The winner in search wasn't going to be the site generating a few extra clicks from the users it already had; it was going to be the site with the most users overall. Google, Sergey had decided, would be the latter.

Having a marketing plan on the way to approval gave me some comfort. No matter how innovative our product was, eventually others would match it. It was the normal course of business. On that day, marketing would be needed to create a clear choice for consumers. On that day, I would step forward and proclaim, "I'm ready to get
up
and do
my
thing."

That day would never come.

It wasn't because Google was lead dog from the get-go and never looked back. "We weren't in the lead," Urs said about the early days. "Google was this tiny company and AltaVista and Inktomi were huge in comparison. Inktomi had a cage in the same data center, twenty times bigger than Google's. Much nicer. They had their logo on the wall. We were a toy company trying to do something new. Our ranking was better, but we were way slower than Inktomi. We could barely keep up and they had a hundred times the traffic we did."

It's just as well I hadn't realized how fragile Google truly was as I set up the meeting to discuss next steps for my marketing plan. It might have imbued me with false confidence that my proposal held all the answers. Instead, I knew I would have to justify spending on each of the steps I had outlined. I started down the list of reasons we needed to implement the plan and why we needed to do it with some urgency.

"The most important thing to consider," I began, "is that our own internal research shows our competitors are beginning to approach Google's level of quality. In a world where all search engines are equal, we'll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from everyone else."

The room grew quiet.

I looked around nervously. Had I said something wrong? Yes. Not just wrong, but heretical to engineers who believed anything could be improved through iterative application of intelligence. Larry made my apostasy clear.

"If we can't win on quality," he said quietly, "we shouldn't win at all." In his view, winning by marketing alone would be deceitful, because it would mean people had been tricked into using an inferior service against their own best interests. It would be nobler to take arms against our sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.

The 1999 Google holiday party was a grad student affair with folding chairs and a few dozen folks crammed into a room decorated with whiteboards. Because of problems in the kitchen, the food was late and came out lukewarm. Sergey attempted to address the celebrants by standing atop a red rubber ball five feet in diameter, but he couldn't maintain his balance despite the trapeze classes he was taking at a local circus. He ad-libbed some jokes and made general remarks about things going well, but offered no glowing vision of the future to reassure us that the company would be around for next year's celebration.

Kristen came away more convinced than ever that I had traded our security for some fly-by-night startup that was halfway to shutting down. The ride home was quiet as the kids went offline in the back seat of the Taurus.

"They seem ... nice," Kristen said, "but do they know what they're doing? It feels kind of disorganized."

"I'm sure things will settle down over time," I murmured over the kids' snores. "They're still putting the company together, so it's a little rough around the edges. It's really not as bad as it looks."

The chaos had already begun to feel normal to me: the jumble of toys, tools, and technology, the roaming dogs dodging electric scooters zipping through the corridors, the micro-kitchen overflowing with free food. I was beginning to see that every aspect of Google's office space had a purpose.

George Salah left Oracle to become Google's facilities manager in 1999 after bonding with Larry and Sergey during a roller hockey game. ("They were much better than I expected for a bunch of engineers," he admitted.) Oracle was an enormously successful international company, so applying their best practices made perfect sense for a young startup. "At Oracle," George noted, "there were standards that I could pull out and say, 'This is what we need to do in Portland.' I said to Larry and Sergey, 'I don't want to re-create the wheel every time. Are you okay with me creating a set of standards?' They looked at me like I was crazy."

"
Absolutely not!
" the founders declared. "We don't want to have
anything
to do with standards. We don't want anything 'standard.'"

"I think that was about the time I began to go bald," George told me, running a hand over his naked pate. "They wanted to be completely different from any company that had come before them. To optimize in every way, shape, and form. I had to throw out everything I had learned in my career and then find vendors and contractors and architects who could begin to understand what the founders wanted—to create the best workplace they possibly could. Not for the sake of aesthetics. It was always function over form."

My colleagues and I, too, were forbidden to do things "the normal and accepted way." As Cindy put it, "Larry and Sergey fundamentally rejected any type of template approaches to marketing Google. At every other company I worked at, when you met with the media you had a set of messages, backed up by a PowerPoint presentation and a leave-behind. You had media training and were prepared with a pat response for any question. Larry and Sergey hated the idea, refused to stick to manufactured messages, did not use presentations, and talked about what they wanted to talk about. The media loved them for it."

My offline marketing colleague Shari was less enamored with our founders' idiosyncratic approach. She hammered Sergey to pay for market research and implored him to bring on an outside agency to develop a promotional campaign. "They just don't get the importance of mass marketing to build the brand," she complained. "They need to trust us to make marketing decisions and let us just do our jobs."

We all wrestled with Google's ambiguous structure. Who were the stakeholders? Who made the final call when we disagreed? Did Larry or Sergey need to approve everything we did? Apparently the company's focus on efficiency didn't extend to decision management.

Confusion about overstepping boundaries was bad enough, but there were worse scenarios than crossing an invisible line. Sometimes a founder put forth "a good idea."

"I have a good idea," Sergey informed Susan Wojcicki a couple of weeks after I started. "Why don't we take the marketing budget and use it to inoculate Chechen refugees against cholera. It will help our brand awareness and we'll get more new people to use Google."

Our company was barely a year old at the time. We had no real revenue. Spending a million dollars of our investors' money on a land war in Asia would indeed be a revolutionary approach to growing market share.

Was Sergey serious? He was. How could I even begin to argue against such a bizarre suggestion? In past jobs, I might have disagreed with colleagues on using radio or TV or debated copy points and tone, but Sergey wasn't even speaking a language I understood.

Looking back a dozen years later, I kind of get Sergey's perspective. Saving lives was a better use of our budget than running ads, which just annoyed people to no effect—and were therefore evil. Why not make a big donation to a humanitarian cause and build awareness by doing good? It had all the classic elements of a Sergey solution: a wildly unconventional approach to a common problem, technology harnessed to improve the human condition, an international scope, and an expectation that the press could be used as a tool to forward our business goals.

Sergey didn't ask Shari or me what we thought of his idea. He knew we would have ridiculed it. Instead, he turned to Susan, one of the few marketers he trusted. She was a member of the inner circle from the University Avenue office, and Google had rented space in her house. Sergey had met her family (he'd later marry her sister), and Susan understood Sergey well enough not to dismiss his outlandish suggestions out of hand. Instead, she went to gather data, which in this case meant asking her mom, a teacher in Palo Alto. As an educator, Susan's mother carried authority with Sergey, and when she confessed to being confused about our plan to support a rebel army in Russia, it took some of the wind out of his sails.

He had a back-up plan, though. "What if we gave out free Google-branded condoms to high-school students?"

Sergey asked Shari and me to investigate other charitable promotions along these lines, and we dutifully did, but it wasn't lost on us that our opinions had only been sought as an afterthought. Susan was part of the marketing group, but Shari and I were supposedly managing it. We felt marginalized. Organizational ambiguity I could handle, but I needed sufficient gravity to show me which way was up and which was down.

We shouldn't do things the way we had in the past. We shouldn't copy other companies. We shouldn't expect to be informed about our strategy, if in fact there was one. We were independent actors, building a cohesive team of nonconformists. I thought I understood: I needed to identify problems and solve them. And so I did.

J
ANUARY
2000. New year. New millennium. New me.

My first month had gotten off to a shaky start, but now I resolved to find solid ground in the primordial ooze of Google's early organization. My first step would be removing an obvious stumbling block between us and success: Google lacked process. We needed a clearly marked path for decision-making about everything from t-shirt design to what product categories we should enter. Fortunately, I was saturated in process implementation, having come from an organization with seven unions, dozens of editors, and an endless appetite for rumination and review. I knew how successful companies set goals, and I would bring the wisdom of the outside world to Google.