I'm Feeling Lucky (18 page)

"I've drafted some lines we could put on the homepage," I told Larry and Sergey at a product review. "They should drive repeat traffic by reaffirming our quality to first-time users. Here's the list."

Sergey didn't look up from the new phone he appeared to be breaking into pieces.

"How are you defining first-time users?" Larry asked. "What if they have cookies turned off?" He glanced at the dozen rows of my text the projector pinned neatly against the screen. "Why don't you use the testimonial quote from
Time
magazine?" he asked before I could answer his first question. "I don't think any of these are going to be very effective."

Sergey raised his head to stare at Larry, who raised an eyebrow in response and spoke.

"You need to make these much more compelling. Like, 'If you printed out all the data Google searches, the stack of pages would reach from here to the moon.'"

Sergey smiled and leaned farther back in his chair.

"No," he said.

Larry's eyebrow shot up again and hovered at its apex.

"What we need to do," Sergey went on, "is test things that are totally random to see what has the biggest effect." His eyebrow called Larry's and raised it a quarter inch.

They stared silently at each other for a moment, their eyebrows dancing a pas de deux in a closed loop of telepathic communication. I sometimes thought I grokked Larry or understood where Sergey was coming from. Observing them together, though, was like trying to catch a glimpse of light in the thin patch of space between twin neutron stars. There was enormous energy being exchanged, but at a spectrum range I could not detect.

Sergey returned his attention to the disassembled phone. "You know what we should do?" he asked his lap. "We should make the homepage hot pink and see how many people come back."

Larry's face lit up as if all the eyebrow bouncing had earned him a free ball and a bonus round.

I smiled too, but when I stopped, they didn't. A doubt crept in. They weren't ... they couldn't be ... surely they didn't mean that as a serious suggestion? I began the long trip from incredulity to denial to sputtering refutation based on logic, only to be sent packing until I could come up with a data-based argument proving their idea lacked merit.

Staking out extreme positions and making staffers fight their way to a safe haven of sanity seemed to amuse our founders. They got to watch forehead veins throb and palms drip sweat as PMs, ops people, and engineers probed carefully, attempting to keep a grip on logic while cutting through a thicket of distractions to defuse explosive ideas.

"Google was the first company I worked at where I had that experience," project manager Deb Kelly recalls. "Where you're thinking, 'That's nuts. That's crazy. That's dumb,' and then thinking about it for a while and going, 'Actually, that might be really, really smart—hard, but really, really smart.'"

The madness was not without method. Not only did Larry and Sergey's hyperbolic proposals force us to reason more tightly, but starting at the ideological antipodes exploited the full value of the intelligence in the room. After Larry or Sergey made one of their outrageous suggestions, nothing that followed would seem inconceivable. To sort the improbable from the impossible, we needed to pay attention and to argue facts, not suppositions or conventions. If we began with only "acceptable" solutions that had been tried before, we would never uncover the state-changing breakthroughs that destroyed worlds and raised new ones from their rubble.

Urs understood this better than most. "Larry and Sergey had an expectation that things would be watered down along the way," he explained. "Starting with something that's more ambitious will get you something that's reasonable. But if you don't put the goal post way out there, people are already taking fewer risks and are less ambitious about how big the idea should be."

It was another reason Google valued intelligence over experience. "In the best case," Urs said, "you had someone who was very excited and didn't know what was impossible and got really far. The big question was always, 'Can you do it cheaply enough for this to actually be affordable?' Maybe, but without trying it and measuring and doing the next iteration, you're not going to find out."

I felt sorry for new Googlers who stepped into the reality abattoir for the first time and looked around the room with naked-at-school-nightmare eyes, trying to see if this was some cruel initiation rite. If you were a goal-oriented, eager-to-please new staffer, what did you say when Sergey insisted, "We should really forget about [whatever topic was under discussion] and focus on building space tethers?"
^*

Meetings weren't the only place ideas went to die. If the founders didn't like a proposal, they might consign it to what PR director David Krane called the "dead letter office": "You'd ship something into the ether and there was no response. That was your way of knowing you'd probably missed."

It didn't help that when Larry and Sergey did respond to our ideas, their responses were often ambiguous. "If they liked something they'd say, 'It doesn't seem too sucky,'" recalls facilities manager George Salah. "When they pushed back on something, they'd say, 'Hmmmm, that seems suboptimal' or use some technical way of saying something between yes and no. They never gave a clear decision."

When I took copy to Sergey for approval, he would say, "It's cute. I like it" or "No. That's not very Googley."

Once I spent days with my team developing a full rationale for an ad campaign, based on what we understood about the target audience and their motivations. Sergey glanced at the layouts, frowned, and said, "I think you need to think about it some more."

"Is it the concept you don't like? The art? The wording?" I asked, looking for something more definitive so we could eliminate what was offensive. He simply shook his head and turned back to his monitor.

"Think about it some more," he repeated infuriatingly.

Eventually I concluded that because Sergey was an engineer, he wanted our ads to depict an idealized world in which everything was optimized, including the people. I discovered that he disliked images that didn't fit a classical notion of beauty and thus could be seen as outliers in the data set of fully realized human potential. One trade ad for our advertising program included a picture of a sweaty sumo wrestler. Sergey wrinkled his nose when we showed it to him. "I don't think we should run ads with unattractive people in them. Our ads should always be aesthetically pleasing so people will think happy thoughts when they think of Google."

Devin Ivester, who left his own ad agency to join us as a creative-team leader,
^*
remembers another such occasion, when he showed Sergey an ad with an exhausted man asleep on a couch, surrounded by books, notes, and papers. Sergey's response was, "No, we can't use that guy. He's ugly."

"You don't mean ugly, right?" Devin asked, somewhat taken aback.

"Well, no, but he's obviously not organized. He's just not a good person."

"How is he not a good person?"

"Well, look at him. He's just asleep on a couch."

"But if you read the headline, he's asleep because he's actually been working all night. He's almost tireless, but at some point he's had to give up."

"Well, obviously, he's disorganized then—if he can't keep up with his workload."

The lesson for Devin was that "Sergey had a very Disney-like idea of what we should show in our ads. It didn't have to be so real life. It was his idea of the perfect Googler and how people should be."

Perhaps because they viewed the world through a polarizing filter of "ideal" and "suboptimal" (or "good" and "evil," if you will) and were so confident about which position they occupied in this binary system, our founders displayed a fondness for hyperbolic vilification of those who disagreed with them. In almost every meeting, they would unleash a one-word imprecation to sum up any and all who stood in the way of their master plans.

"Bastards!" Sergey would mutter if a competitor signed a client we were pursuing.

"Bastards!" Larry would exclaim when a blogger raised concerns about user privacy.

"Bastards!" they would say about the press, the politicians, or the befuddled users who couldn't grasp the obvious superiority of the technology behind Google's products.

It was a little intimidating until you got used to it, but it wasn't long before "bastards" became corporate nomenclature for any individual or institution that didn't see things the Google way. Ratings services undercounted our traffic? Bastards! Hard-drive vendors refused to cut deals below wholesale cost? Bastards! It became so prevalent that someone proposed that Sergey's five-word acceptance speech for an online award should be "The Webbys are for bastards."

Things could have been worse. In fact, they could have been far worse.

I rarely heard profanity in the halls of the Googleplex, where raised voices raised eyebrows. People could be infuriating, but the approved response was to bludgeon them with facts until they succumbed to superior logic. Not that Larry and Sergey couldn't be caustic, even to each other. David Krane, who traveled extensively with the founders, sums up their relationship this way: "Those guys had a communications channel that was very direct, very open. When there was tension, it was when they were fighting over data. They would be downright rude to each other, confidently dismissing ideas as stupid or naive or calling each other bastards. But no one would pout."

It didn't take long to figure out that Larry and Sergey wanted to optimize the organization until it was as efficient as its technology. Anything that increased costs or reduced productivity added friction and slowed our progress. Ideally, we would churn out perfect products while incurring no expense. That was impossible, of course, but it didn't stop us from trying.

"I negotiated a really great deal for this data," I bragged to Sergey as I presented a spreadsheet showing all the countries for which we would get traffic rankings once our research contract was signed. "They offered twenty percent off at first, but I hammered them down to half."

Sergey poked and sniffed at the spreadsheet as if looking for chunks of meat in a vegetable stew.

"I don't think this is going to be very useful data," he told me. "They don't have much experience in these markets, and they're trying to expand their customer base. Having Google as a client would give them some great credibility." I knew what came next. It was as inevitable as rain after a carwash. "They should really pay us," Sergey said.

"They should pay us" was the starting position for any negotiation with a vendor. As Google grew in prominence, the benefit of being tied to our rising star increased exponentially—at least in Larry's and Sergey's minds. As our brand value approached infinity, our costs should go to zero. To the founders, winning a deep discount wasn't a victory; it was an admission of failure to get something for free. Their high expectations for low prices became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because I dreaded bringing them any proposal that shaved only ten or fifteen percent off the rack rate. "Never pay retail" was a Google core value. I was lucky, though. Marketing didn't buy services every day, so I didn't spend all my time beating suppliers into submission. It was different for facilities.

By late spring of 2000, Google's rate of growth was accelerating on all fronts. Traffic was building, our advertising had caught on, and so many dot-com refugees claimed space in the Plex that the walls bulged every time someone exhaled. Lines began forming outside the men's room, leading an engineer to install a "take a number" machine next to the stalls. In oversaturated offices, the person closest to the door had to stand up when an office mate wanted to leave or enter. Corridors were so choked with desks and power cords and boxed computer components that a stroll down the hall felt like a tour of Akihabara.

"We took a building that supposedly had a capacity of 220 and packed it with 298 people," George Salah confided when no fire marshal could hear him.

Engineers Howard Gobioff and Ben Smith complained to eStaff (the executive staff) that lack of room was poor for morale and adversely affected productivity. In the midst of a hiring frenzy, they were conducting phone interviews in the stairwells and out on the grass because all the conference rooms and private offices now housed multiple full-time occupants. Cubes for two people held four workstations, and whenever employees were out of the building for more than a day, newly hired engineers would appropriate their spaces. Worst of all, work teams were split up and located in different parts of the building, hindering communication.

Larry and Sergey gave George the okay to acquire more space. Sergey helpfully advised him that SGI's office six blocks away looked "nice." It was a joke. SGI's world headquarters complex had four massive buildings, each of which dwarfed ours.

"In April 2000, an office building across from us came available," George recalls. "They wanted $8.00 per square foot and we were paying just over $2.50. I said to Larry and Sergey, 'This is a ridiculous price. I don't think we should even bother with it.' They said, 'No, let's put in an offer.'"

George saw trouble brewing. The Silicon Valley vacancy rate was parked at one percent, and landlords saw no need to negotiate. "We're going to have to deal with this guy again," he warned them. "He owns all of Mountain View. We don't want to get on his bad side. Let's not place an offer."