Jerry Yang was the savvier businessman of the two, although as subsequent events proved, not savvy enough. You might remember, Yahoo was a household name in the 1990s. Today, it might as well not exist, as it has a mere 1.82 percent of the online search market. In 2016, after many attempts at resuscitation (most recently by former Googler Marissa Mayer), it became the first major league player from the 1990s to be sold, to Verizon. Its demise was ultimately precipitated by two things. First, the inability to decide exactly what kind of company it wanted to be: An information aggregator? A portal? A media company? A tech firm? Second, and perhaps even more important, its inability to monetize the marvelously innovative search engine technology developed by a Valley start-up called GoTo (later renamed Overture), which Yahoo acquired in 2003.
Unfortunately, Yang and Filo had acquired not just Overture, but also the lawsuit that was under way to try to protect its intellectual property, which the original creators had neglected to enforce with patents. Because GoTo’s IP could be taken with impunity, it wasn’t long before a relatively new player on the scene—that is, Google—swooped in. Google’s founders saw a feature in GoTo that Yang and Filo had overlooked: an auction function that would allow them to cash in on the ever-growing volume of search data by serving up hyper-targeted ads to the very users from whom that data was gleaned. This technology became the precursor to the online advertising auction system that represents the foundation of Google’s business model today.
In those pre-IPO days of the early nineties, Brin and Page were spending most of their time in a cramped office at Stanford, where they were both grad students, amid computer screens, stacks of research papers, and their own budding entrepreneurial ambitions—just a pair of unshaven computer nerds building what would ultimately become the world’s largest platform technology company. Brin was the cocky, outgoing one; Page the more introverted. Neither of them was getting much attention back then. In those innocent days, the coolest kid in the Valley was probably Kim Polese, the whiz kid behind Sun Microsystems’ Java, a customizable, sound-and-graphics-enabled programming platform that brought the Internet to life. Kim was dubbed the “Madonna of Silicon Valley,” named one of Time magazine’s twenty-five most influential Americans on the Internet, and even appeared on the cover of Fortune.
Silicon Valley was a far more playful place back then, before the big money hit, and I was psyched to attend Polese’s launch party for her new company, Marimba. I remember that it was full of interesting, open, energetic, and unpretentious people who seemed genuinely excited about creating the New New Thing. It was mostly guys starting the businesses back then (as it is now); Polese was one of the first women to break into the boys’ club of Silicon Valley, an early prototype, as it were, of more recognizable names such as Marissa Mayer, then the Yahoo CEO, and more recently Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, the queen to Zuckerberg’s king. They were just as hard driving as the men, perhaps even more so. Mayer famously went back to work two weeks after having her first child. She and her husband, venture capitalist Zack Bogue, once confided to a writer for Vogue that they didn’t set any boundaries between work and life. The writer marveled at how their parallel texting and emailing continued throughout breakfast, dinner, social events, and even during their interview with her.
Sandberg is the archetypal Harvard grad—stellar student, McKinsey alum, star networker, and by all accounts a tireless self-promoter. As Roger McNamee, the venture capitalist who eventually hired Sandberg to be COO of Facebook, wrote in his own book, Zucked,5 “Sheryl Sandberg is brilliant, ambitious, and supremely well organized. She manages every detail of her life, paying particular attention to her image. Until 2018, she had a consigliere, Elliot Schrage, whose title was vice president of global communications, marketing, and public policy, but whose real job appeared to be protecting Sheryl’s flank, something he had done since her time at Google.”6 (Schrage has since stepped down from Facebook amid the company’s PR scandals.)
I was first introduced to Sandberg by a mutual acquaintance in an airport en route to Davos, where she’s become a regular fixture. Her famous book Lean In reveals much of that sort of relentless ambition, which, I have to confess, I’ve always found exhausting. To me, the book seemed less an effort to address work-life balance than an attempt to brand herself as “pro-woman,” perhaps in anticipation of the political career that many expect her to ultimately have, if she eventually manages to spin away her role in Facebook’s privacy and election-meddling debacles.
If indeed she does run someday, it will be interesting to see how she brands herself on the campaign trail. As the election-meddling scandal has illuminated, Sandberg’s core political views are, like those of so many in Silicon Valley, much more libertarian than liberal. Facebook was so desperate to protect its top leadership and its business model that Sandberg’s right-hand man, Elliot Schrage, used personal clout and connections to fight off early investigations into the company’s connection to Russian election manipulation7—even going so far as to hire a PR firm that used anti-Semitism (a particular travesty given that both Sandberg and Zuckerberg are Jewish) as a political weapon.
Indeed, it was Schrage who was on the front lines defending Sandberg and Zuckerberg after The New York Times broke the story, and it was Schrage who subsequently took the fall for Sandberg herself, resigning from Facebook and making a public apology in which he—quite unconvincingly—accepted full responsibility for the whole affair. As Patrick Gaspard, president of the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, wrote in a letter in late 2018 to Sandberg: “The notion that your company, at your direction,” tried to “discredit people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest Facebook’s role in disseminating vile propaganda, is frankly astonishing to me.”8
Being liberal in the Valley, it seems, is more about identity and less about ideology. I always found it interesting, for example, that the Lean In approach to gender equality seemed to put all the onus on the woman, versus focusing on the public responsibility to provide things like, say, humane working hours or decent childcare. It’s a view that’s common within the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party that many in the tech community gravitate toward, just like many of their “liberal” brethren on Wall Street do. (On that note, it’s worth remembering that Sandberg was a protégé of corporatist Democrat and “too-big-to-fail” deregulator Larry Summers, for whom she was chief of staff in the Treasury Department.)
While the Silicon Valley crew likes to think of themselves as do-gooders, they often don’t make much room for the common good. It’s always seemed ironic to me that even as many tech titans complain about the need for public sector education reform to create a twenty-first-century workforce, they also push for tax cuts and corporate subsidies that starve government of its ability to pay for such reform. What’s true at the macro level can be seen at the micro level. I’m not the first to point out the lack of gender or many other types of diversity in Silicon Valley. Walk around any of the sprawling Menlo Park campuses or tall San Francisco towers where many tech companies now operate and you’ll see few women, people of color, or, for that matter, anyone born prior to 1980. Instead, you’ll see a lot of white men under forty, many of whose lack of social skills would put them “on the spectrum.” These are the engineers, and they are hailed as kings.
On the surface, this makes sense. The engineers, after all, are the ones who write the code and build the platforms and design the software and hardware upon which these companies run. The problem is the engineering mind-set, which focuses solely on “how do we get more efficiently from point A to point C,” without much thought about the collateral effects of bypassing point B, which might represent everything from the free press to citizen privacy. The result of this solutions-minded mentality is a kind of tunnel vision and cognitive blindness that goes a long way in explaining the lack of diversity, the toxic cultures, and the embarrassing PR blunders that plague
so many Big Tech companies.
Gods Among Men
There is one faction in Silicon Valley whose status exceeds even that of the engineer-kings. I am referring, of course, to the VCs. If software and code are the bones of any tech company, then capital is the lifeblood, and the venture capitalists are the giant, pumping hearts that keep the blood flowing. I’m not denying that venture capital is often a necessary ingredient for innovation, or that it hasn’t enabled or supported the existence of many worthy enterprises that contribute positively to society and enhance all of our lives. But any time you have a group that is held so high on a pedestal—and swimming in so much wealth—it’s inevitable that at least a portion of those individuals are going to end up developing a bit of a God complex.
Consider someone like Peter Thiel, one of the infamous “PayPal Mafia,” and among the first seed investors in Facebook, who went on to launch Palantir and the prominent VC firm Founders Fund. Thiel is a Trump supporter and libertarian who is critical of government and even education: Each year, he famously offers hundreds of thousands of dollars to encourage students to drop out of college and start companies instead. One of his strange obsessions is the desire to cheat death. Thiel says he finds the general population’s acceptance of the prospect of death “pathological,” and, along with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sergey Brin, has spent millions supporting “life extension” research dedicated to “ending aging forever.”9 This, I suppose, is only slightly more ambitious a goal than those of his PayPal partner Elon Musk, also the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who envisions supersonic commuter travel and colonizing Mars in the not too distant future (though how he’ll fund it is anyone’s guess, since he keeps tanking the price of Tesla’s stock with his security-law-violating tweets, whiskey-and-cannabis-induced rants, and false claims about the company’s financial profile).
You could argue that all of this is simply part of the “think different” mind-set, one that is necessary for entrepreneurship and radical change. The problem is that with it often comes a strong sense of entitlement and a weak sense of responsibility for any consequence of one’s actions. Uber’s Travis Kalanick, who became infamous for calling his company “Boober”—a crude reference to how it helped him get dates—is a great example of how this sort of tunnel vision can manifest.10 This wasn’t just adolescent posturing or “locker room talk,” either; it’s just one of many examples of the toxic, misogynistic culture that eventually resulted in his resignation as CEO.
Corporate sex scandals are the canaries in the coal mine of the business world: omens that foretell larger troubles plaguing the organizational culture. It hardly seems coincidental that Facebook has had its own host of sexual harassment scandals, as have Google and Amazon. When Roy Price, the top executive at Amazon Studios, was accused of sexual harassment, CEO Jeff Bezos turned a blind eye. Bezos himself was embroiled in a sordid sexting scandal in which he sent multiple penis selfies to a Fox TV personality, an episode that coincided with the end of his marriage and resulted in an ugly, high-profile legal battle with the publication that broke the story, the National Enquirer, which Bezos claimed had tried to extort him.11
My experience in business reporting tells me that incidents like these, more often than not, signal something amiss in a company’s culture—particularly when they come in multiples. That was my first thought when reading in late 2018 about how Google paid the founder of its Android mobile system, Andy Rubin, a $90 million bonus as he was leaving the company, while attempting to keep quiet about one of the reasons he was leaving—a sexual misconduct claim. The details of it all had an ick factor that landed the story on the front page of The New York Times.12 But it was a line in a leaked internal email response to the article, from Google chief executive Sundar Pichai to the Google staff, that really got my attention: “In the last two years, 48 people have been terminated for sexual harassment, including 13 who were senior managers and above. None of these individuals received an exit package.”
Well, at least they weren’t rewarded with tens of millions of dollars for their behavior; that’s a positive, I guess. But really—forty-eight people? What does this say about the company? A toxic corporate culture, to be sure. But to me, this information, in the context of the numerous sexual indiscretions of technologists at many other platform companies, was a sign of something larger: a toxic business model. That is to say, one that incentivizes these companies to tolerate plenty of egregious behavior by their top talent—assuming they are boosting the bottom line—until they are fully exposed and forced into action by the outrage of the general public.
I’m sure the majority of Silicon Valley CEOs don’t condone sexual harassment, but most do seem to be rather oblivious to how they are perceived in the wider public—perhaps because they don’t have to spend much time outside the greater Palo Alto bubble. Consider Elon Musk’s take on riding the New York subway: “It’s a pain in the ass….There’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer.”13
The iconoclastic attitudes are sometimes baked in early. Marissa Mayer (who once dated Larry Page) once pointed out that if you want to understand Page and his cofounder, you had to know they both went to Montessori schools, where the philosophy emphasizes firing students’ imaginations rather than just stuffing their heads with book learning. Mayer believes their unconventional educations fostered in both Googlers a willful independence and determination to go their own way, regardless of the expectations of others. As she put it to tech journalist Steven Levy in his wonderfully reported book about Google, In the Plex, one of the best sources for early history on the company, “In Montessori school you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do it that afternoon, not because the teacher said so. This is really baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems.”14
Just how much their early educations shaped them is impossible to tell, but there’s no question that their college years only reinforced this freewheeling “rules are made to be broken” ideal. Brin whipped through his undergraduate comp sci degree at the University of Michigan in three years, landing him in Stanford’s computer science doctoral program at nineteen, the youngest student ever to join the department. When Page showed up to get his own comp sci PhD in the fall of 1995 at nineteen, Brin was two years ahead of him. Later, Page said that he found Brin “pretty obnoxious,”15 which may be his way of saying that he found Brin so impressive, he had to knock him down a peg. Stanford reeked of the competitiveness that comes from unbridled ambition masquerading as social conscience. It was the place to go if you were determined to change the world—and get rich for doing so.
Page and Brin were both involved in the Human-Computer Interaction group that eventually yielded the Persuasive Technology Lab (which I’ll talk more about in chapter 6), whose work centered around taking advantage of the vast new realm of cyberspace that was just starting to be generally known as the World Wide Web. Many Stanford students saw this new virtual territory much in the same way that the first explorers to reach California must have seen the land that eventually became Silicon Valley: as highly lucrative real estate upon which things must immediately be built. Most were working to erect “portals,” a point of access to news, as well as a hub from which to send email or post pictures.
Brin and Page took a radically different tack. With so much new content coming onto the Web every day—all the articles, photographs, and songs people were posting on the seemingly infinite number of new websites cropping up—they were focused on developing a way to quickly sort through it all. They understood that when the ingenious British engineer Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web back in 1989, his genius was the ability to see that all the things living in cyberspace were connected to other things. It was a welter, sure, but a welter that could be organized like any other. To him, the Web was like the Library of Congress, with each book bearing a catalog number. Only it was better than a libra
ry, as most of the documents were strung together via “hyperlinks,” providing a vast network of interconnections, a web that physical libraries lacked. This Web was an unimaginably vast new frontier that could be claimed by whoever organized it first.
Brin and Page were determined to be the ones to plant that flag. At the time, “search” on the World Wide Web was a bit like trying to find a needle in a very large haystack, except that the needle was not a needle at all, but a straw of hay amid billions of other straws of hay. Fortunately, thanks to Berners-Lee, each straw on the Web bore a unique address, or URL, and most of them contained hyperlinks that connected one bit of straw to another. Still, the World Wide Web consisted of billions of items, with more pouring in every second. How could they possibly manage to organize it in such a way that would allow people to find that one specific straw they needed?
Let’s say you wanted information on Tim Berners-Lee. The reigning approach of AltaVista, then the leading search engine, assumed that the document you’d most want would be the one with the most mentions of Tim Berners-Lee. Page and Brin thought that was silly. Just because the words appeared many times didn’t mean it would necessarily offer the best, most useful information on the subject. But what would? Here, Larry Page relied on an insight from his parents’ background in academia, where the most desirable papers on a topic were never the ones that just repeated a term or name endlessly, but the one that other papers cited most frequently. On the Web, the equivalent to those citations were the hyperlinks, which meant that their search engine would need a way to tally up all these hyperlinks. So Page and Brin developed a program they called BackRub, because it tracked links back to other documents.
Don't Be Evil Page 6