I'm Feeling Lucky (23 page)

That we used the same systems as engineering, however, did not mean we were equal partners in the product-development process. "Never, ever,
ever
delay the launch of a product just for a marketing issue," Cindy warned us. It was the third rail of company politics. We could not fall behind or fail to deliver. If my piece of a project wasn't completely up to my standards and the launch date was at hand, I would have to dump all the loose screws into the box, solder it shut, and hand it off to the engineers impatiently waiting for it. And then move on.

A day would come-or at least a moment—when it would be appropriate to stop and drink the decaf, reflect on what we had accomplished, and contemplate what lay ahead. This was not that moment. "There's plenty of time," Cindy reminded us on numerous occasions, "to rest when we die."

T
HE MARKETING PLAN
I had drafted drifted along without a budget for implementation, so Shari and I salvaged the elements we could execute ourselves. My situation wasn't completely untenable. Most of my proposals entailed online promotions that didn't require hard dollars for the purchase of media or materials. If need be, I could barter search services for banner-ad space on other sites.

Shari didn't have as many options. She became increasingly frustrated with her inability to convince Larry and Sergey to spend money on offline customer acquisition. When she requested outside resources, the answer was "Why don't you do it yourself? It's not that hard." In Google's culture, when you ran into a wall, you built a ladder. If there was a moat beyond the wall, you made a boat. If there was a crocodile in the moat, you fed it one of your arms and used the other to paddle across. The takeaway was "Take responsibility. Do something."

So Shari did. She went shopping for an outside agency to create the offline promotion she had been planning. She didn't have much luck. "We were disappointed at how close-minded Larry and Sergey were," her first choice admonished her. "We don't trust Larry, so you'd have to pay us in advance."

Larry and Sergey didn't disguise their antipathy toward ad agencies and the industry to which they belonged. They were disgusted by the sea of self-congratulatory awards and the bad math and the pseudoscientific jargon used to proclaim advertising's effectiveness. Larry even hated the stiff black cardboard that agencies used to present creative campaigns—each concept perfectly center-mounted to convey greater gravitas. To Larry, a good idea was self-evident, even if scrawled on a wrinkled napkin in blotchy ballpoint. Ad agencies, he hinted, were full of bumbling simpletons and evil dissemblers.

When Shari located a promotion agency willing to take our account, she acted boldly. She signed a contract and put them to work. When Larry and Sergey found out, they made it clear that when they urged us to "do something," they meant "do something that doesn't cost Google money." And that wasn't the worst of it.

Google didn't acknowledge outside firms that served the company—not even for client references. As the company grew in size and stature, suppliers begged for permission to announce their ties to us, often offering steep discounts if they could just display Google's logo on their client lists. Almost always we said no. We spent valuable time evaluating vendors. Why spare our competitors the same hardship by tipping them off that we had found a company worthy of our business? It would be far better if our competition made its own choices, and, perhaps, chose badly.

That's why I was amazed to read in
Advertising Age
that we had signed an agency to handle our five-million-dollar promotion account. No one had authorized the article or known it was coming. The agency had taken the initiative to place it and to exaggerate the facts. It was not the kind of creative effort we wanted from them. All of Larry and Sergey's hot buttons were mashed at once—strongly and repeatedly—and Shari suddenly had a crisis on her hands.

I empathized with her and wanted to help, but there wasn't much I could do to sway our founders toward acceptance of our new partners. Shari would have to convince them on her own.

Each morning I scanned the press for signs that the tectonics of our industry had shifted overnight. Who had been acquired? Who had a new alliance? Whom did we need to fear? Sitting in my cube thumbing through the May 2000 issue of the magazine
Upside,
^*
I found an in-depth analysis of the search space. I scanned it eagerly to see how things were viewed from outside the Plex. Reading the article, I learned that our focus on search was outdated and our strategy was doomed.

"In the early days, search was the marquee item and major driver of traffic on our site," Excite's director of search told
Upside,
"...but now it is one of many services." Google just had search. Well, search and a directory. Did that constitute "many services"?

"What's missing from search is the context," said Peter Kui at Disney's
Go.com
.
^†
He added, "You only get that by being part of the entertainment business ... There will be niche search players. Some will come at it from a technology standpoint, but we take the larger view." A technology standpoint offered an insufficiently large view? Should we also be working a Mickey Mouse angle?

AltaVista would face a serious channel-conflict challenge,
Upside
predicted, because it was peddling its technology to other portals while maintaining a consumer site of its own. Well, at least someone wasn't doing better than we were. Wait. Wasn't that
our
strategy?

Inktomi,
Upside
noted approvingly, was "the only major search engine to focus exclusively on providing search technology to other sites." Inktomi had Yahoo as a client. They had AOL. Now they had Microsoft. Despite all that fabulous success, however, Inktomi had lost $2.4 million in their fourth quarter. They had exclusive deals with the three biggest sites on the Internet and were still losing money? That didn't bode well for a company just getting into the business.

Ask Jeeves offered a "natural language" interface they claimed could answer questions written in plain English. They also had a spiffy cartoon butler for a logo and a big marketing budget. I had tested Jeeves and found their branding much better than their search results. Evidently they reached the same conclusion, because they bought the up-and-coming search company Direct Hit in early 2000. Direct Hit was pretty good, though when I asked Larry if it was a threat, he replied, "Any technology can do a good job with a hundred thousand queries a day. It's a lot harder to do it with a hundred million."

Still, good technology combined with strong brand awareness could make Ask Jeeves a search juggernaut. And wasn't it always the butler who turned out to be the bad guy?

Finally,
Upside
turned to upstart Google, noting, "In terms of pure technology, Google is getting the best reviews."

"Google is a shining example of superior technology actually drawing traffic on the Internet rather than marketing," analyst Danny Sullivan pointed out, explaining why Google had grown to more than ten million searches a day in just over two years.

Not that it would help,
Upside
opined, since "the company seems to give such short shrift to the more mundane aspects of developing corporate strategy, penetrating new markets, and creating revenue. Nor does anyone in [the] Googleplex have a clear timetable for when Google will turn search technology into profit." Yeah, I was kind of wondering about that myself.

The article's conclusion implied that Ask Jeeves would ultimately pull ahead, because it "has a clear sense of direction and is staking out an important niche [that] has great potential as a tool for customer service." Google, it suggested, might be an acquisition target for AltaVista.

As I finished reading, I realized that I had allowed myself to inhale the air of inevitability settling around our office like a tule fog. People were putting in long hours, our technology clearly worked, and revenue continued to grow. How could things go wrong? Yet, for all the confidence I felt inside the Googleplex, there was a world of doubt outside our doors. Established players had more polished brands, greater market share, and better business strategies. Google's only asset was a reasonably good tool for finding information.

Search, however, would surprise the skeptics. Technology not only mattered; it mattered in a way that was immediately and completely obvious. People searched with a purpose: to find a particular item of information that they needed. A site that obscured its search box behind a wall of links and paid promotions was as useful as a box of crayons for filling in a crossword puzzle. Distracting and fun to play with—but not practical for the task at hand.

Google's founders believed down to their DNA that simplicity was a benefit. They pared Google to its essentials for one reason: as insatiable consumers of data, they used it themselves. To them, Google was a tool, nothing more. A hammer that did one thing really, really well. "Context" didn't make the hammer work better. Neither did a cartoon butler.

In 2000, only a handful of people saw the value of pure search clearly, and many of them already worked at Google. Quietly, steadily, and without even a hint to their colleagues down the hall, the engineers were building a plan to share their vision of a perfect hammer with a much wider audience.

Because, they knew, the world was full of nails.

Larry and Sergey, for all their opacity and their antipathy toward traditional thinkers, were easy to approach and easy to like. That was fortunate, since once I had tossed them the keys to my future, they had slipped behind the wheel of my psyche and taken it careering over bumpy back roads and slick mountain switchbacks. My ego struggled to keep a grip. They were twenty-six years old, but not the first successful young people to pass through my career. At the
Merc
I had met with Elon Musk of Zip2, who sold his startup for $300 million at age twenty-eight before helping to found a new venture called PayPal. Successful young technology executives were the crabgrass of the Valley, popping up everywhere and self-confidently calling attention to their greenness as they choked out the existing paradigm in one field after another.

Annie, my boss at the
Merc,
was a decade younger than I was, yet she taught me how to respectfully disagree with superiors in the face of catastrophic decisions. I was sure Larry and Sergey would act diplomatically with their superiors—if they ever met any. Backers read a lack of deference to others among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as confidence and disapproved when one of our candidates seemed "too much in awe of authority." That observation was never made about our founders, who paid deference only to data.

As the progenitors of a golden goose that had sprung from their own minds, Larry and Sergey had no obligation to kowtow to anyone. They treated the Queen of England as an equal and Benazir Bhutto as a friend. When they wanted business advice, they called Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett. They spoke bluntly to industry leaders they felt weren't getting what was self-evident to them, chastised vendors, and ignored or badgered staff members who disagreed with their ideas, even if those staffers had more experience or more advanced degrees.
^*
They weren't intentionally rude so much as constantly impatient to keep things moving along the path that sometimes only they could see.

Even before they had the funds to start a company, "the Google guys" antagonized potential investors with their aggressive style. They gave no quarter and left none on the table. They insisted that Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invest together or not at all, because it was to Google's advantage to have both of the Valley's premier VC firms backing them. Our founders set the terms of the valuation according to what they saw as the potential of the technology they had created, not according to the accumulated acumen of the men who had funded Yahoo, eBay, Sun, and Amazon. Neither Larry nor Sergey had been to business school or run a large corporation, but Larry had studied more than two hundred business books to prepare for his role running Google as a competitive entity. He trusted his own synthesis of what he had read as much as anything he might have picked up in a classroom.

Self-aggrandizement often accompanies a sense of personal infallibility, but Larry and Sergey rarely displayed signs of undue self-importance. They didn't scream at people or make grand pronouncements or believe the inflated claims about Google in the press. In fact, any hint of puffery in presentations would engender a rapid-fire request to "just get to the data."

They did have healthy egos, of course, and as their reputations grew apace with the company, they even joked about the enlarged magazine covers the PR department hung in the halls featuring their oversized portraits. Larry claimed the display didn't prove the company was promulgating a cult of personality—at least, not yet.

"When we have statues," he warned, "then you should worry."

Given their habit of abruptly cutting off debate, I was surprised at how much Larry and Sergey valued others' opinions. We had no shortage of those. Googlers shared their views willingly. Aggressively, even.

Call it "crowd-sourcing" or "illumination through alternative insights," asking what other Googlers thought was fundamental to the way Google worked. After all, Googlers had been poked, prodded, and sniffed before gaining a desk in the Plex, so anyone wearing a badge was clearly one of the clueful. It didn't matter if an idea came from someone fresh out of college or a veteran VP of engineering; it would stand or fall on its own merits rather than on the status of the person putting it forward. Even a lowly marketer could make suggestions and expect them to be considered.