"I wasn't really thinking that he'd change jobs after just three months," said Urs, "but what he said was, 'It's good timing, because I'm bored. I've solved all the technical problems there are to solve at this company, so I'm thinking maybe I made a mistake.'"
Jeff couldn't wait to engage the challenges at Google. He showed up weeks before his official start date, before he'd even left the other company, and wrote code without being on the payroll because he "wanted to hit the ground running."
Two dozen former DEC researchers would follow Jeff to Google. Many, including Sanjay, were encouraged by the knowledge that Jeff was already there. Mindful of Urs's admonition to hire great people, Jeff went after them with every means at his disposal, including placing recruiting ads on Google that appeared whenever someone searched for obscure coding-related keywords like "TLB shootdown" or "lock free synchronization." (After engineer Paul Haahr joined Google, he told Jeff, "Any company that advertises on 'lock free synchronization' is good enough for me.")
While many of those who came from DEC took on major roles—for example, Monika Henzinger became Google's research director and Krishna Bharat created Google news—it was system designer Sanjay who perfectly modulated Jeff's irrepressible need to keep dashing forward. Tall and soft-spoken with premature touches of gray, Sanjay walked quietly through the halls projecting an air of unaffected professorial dignity, reminding me of Obi-Wan Kenobi in his later years of wisdom.
Jeff described the stoichiometry of their partnership this way: "Sanjay and I balance each other pretty well, because he tends to be more reserved and analytical and I tend to say, 'Let's do something now. Let's get it done.' Put the two of us together and we go just the right speed."
Ben Gomes put it slightly differently as he explained to me why he was so comfortable working with Sanjay. Sanjay was very, very smart in a way that was systematic and therefore easy to follow, "whereas Jeff was just brilliant." Ben added, "I couldn't learn to be brilliant."
Engineering had speed and direction and was accelerating toward the goal of building a better Google. Those of us in marketing wanted a better Google, too, but we weren't as clear on how to get there.
"Technically, something either works or it doesn't," ops manager Jim Reese once acknowledged. "If our site is up, it's up. With marketing, there's more gray area." That gray area was bounded by a slippery slope, according to our founders, and at the bottom of that slope lay a cesspool of intellectual dishonesty. Over my first few weeks, the marketing group had to sort out priorities and roles, so it's not surprising that Larry and Sergey did not know exactly what we were doing. They gave a few clues to how they felt about marketing in general, though.
"It doesn't have to be true—it's marketing," Sergey joked about our corporate web pages.
"That's because marketing likes to lie," Larry let slip. He smiled when he said it, but I sensed we were being held to account for everything engineers hated about the nonquantifiable world, with its corrupted communications and frequent flyer programs. God help anyone who offered a marketing opinion as if it were a scientific fact.
As a result of Larry and Sergey's skepticism, we in marketing never attained the sense of purpose Urs brought to engineering. Cindy handled PR with surgical precision and Larry and Sergey trusted her judgment, but the founders wanted to wield marketing like a sledge instead of a scalpel. They'd tell her to "press release" things, by which they meant alert the media that we'd made changes no one but engineers would care about. Reporters didn't respond to whistles only dogs could hear. Cindy held off the founders and went about stitching together deeper, long-term relationships, so when we finally had something worthy of an announcement the press would pay attention.
Before a press release could go out, though, Larry insisted on running the draft past everyone in the building.
"I agreed to do it, with reservations," said Cindy. "I definitely never did this at any other company. I did not have that kind of relationship with engineers at Apple because we had layers of organization between marketing and the techies, and I don't think that's unusual. We lived in different buildings, different worlds. I was pleasantly surprised by the tone and quality of the feedback I got from Googlers."
Google was different that way. Even though engineers were kept separate according to the floor plan, email penetrated all corners of the company and communal meals and snack rooms led to plenty of cross-pollination. It was surprising to me, too, how articulate and interesting the techies turned out to be when you got to know them, though as you might expect, coders were sticklers for the rules of grammar.
"Split infinitive," Craig noted about some copy I had written.
"Shouldn't that be 'the' instead of 'a'?" Urs asked about a tagline.
"'This' and 'FAQs' don't agree in number," another engineer admonished me.
I never minded these grammatical suggestions and corrections, which kept me on my toes and made me conscious that someone was paying attention to what I produced. But that didn't mean I embraced every suggestion that came in from would-be marketers in other departments. And there were so, so many of them.
Striking Out
I didn't know anything about Salar Kamangar when he came to me in my first month at Google and asked for help. Someone mentioned he had been an intern. On the basis of that single fact, I underestimated him, as I suspect most people did. Larry and Sergey had hired Salar out of Stanford as Google's ninth employee in the spring of 1999. They tried him out as a temp for a couple of weeks, then put him on the payroll, where his undefined role as savant-at-large grew to encompass every new business challenge the company encountered, from hiring a controller to transferring the company's twenty-five-million-dollar nest egg from one bank to another. He was twenty-two at the time.
Salar was a Porsche packaged as a Dodge Dart. Dark haired with large, limpid brown eyes and a shy, infectious grin, he could have stood in for Sal Mineo in Rebel without a Cause, but despite his disarming demeanor, he argued his positions with passion, persuasiveness, and persistence. For a thin man, he was very hard to get around.
Salar's friends had an Internet company that mailed free postcards for users who typed in a message and a recipient's address. Their revenue came from selling ads to be printed on the cards.
"I signed us up for a free trial," Salar informed me. "Could you work with them to make it happen? We can promote it through the Google Friends newsletter."* The postcards seemed like a strange way to market Google, and I wasn't happy that a marketing decision was being made by someone who was not in our department—by someone, in fact, who didn't seem to have a department. I didn't want to be overly negative about Salar's idea, though, so I agreed to give it a shot.
Shari suggested we send it out to a professional designer. "Anything that goes to thirty thousand of our most loyal fans should have some serious thought put into it," she insisted. "Especially in the absence of any other Google branding out there."
"Hmmmm," I thought. "This is something I could do myself—a chance to knock an easy one out of the park." Besides, I'd already figured out that Larry and Sergey didn't like spending money on freelancers. I poured my soul into it. I spent hours searching for the perfect stock photos and writing lines that tenuously tied random images to Google products.
The company running the promotion died before any cards could be sent, and I had nothing to show for my efforts but a collection of strained puns. I kicked myself for having made such a marginal project a priority. There must have been more meaningful things to do. Why was I finding it so hard to get into gear?
I felt a strange paralysis induced by infinite possibilities. How many times could I rearrange my desk and make to-do lists? I looked for something familiar to grab onto. My old employer, Knight Ridder, announced they were killing off their online clipping service, NewsHound. Google could snap up the technology, improve it, rebrand it, and relaunch it. A news-alert system seemed like a good fit for Google, since we appeared to be all about providing infor
mation to people. I sent a proposal to Larry and Sergey, who thought it would be worth looking into and asked me to set up a meeting. That was more like it—single-handedly bridging the divide between old and new media.
"What exactly would we be buying?" Sergey asked a couple of days before the meeting was to happen.
"We'd be buying their filtering technology," I answered. "We'd have to negotiate separately for the actual news feeds."
"Oh," said Larry. "That's not very interesting."
"Yeah," Sergey agreed. "The news feeds are the interesting part. I'd rather not meet to talk about the other stuff. Let Salar take a look at it and see if it's worth going after the data."
I swung my attention to Salar and tried to salvage something of the original proposal. Sergey wanted news in our index; surely we could work something out? Salar was noncommittal. "I'm not sure this is how we want to add news to the site," he told me after talking with Sergey.
In fact, it wasn't even close. NewsHound was kicked to the curb like a mangy mutt. Larry and Sergey, even without looking at it, knew Google could build a better product in-house. Writing code was easy, so why spend money on some mongrel technology they'd only have to fix? What we really needed was the content, because building an international news organization would be complicated and expensive.
Had NewsHound been a disruptive technology that changed its industry, Larry and Sergey would have wanted not just the code but the Google-caliber engineers behind it. That way, Google would own their future breakthrough ideas as well as the ones they'd already developed. Larry and Sergey didn't like renting intelligence when they could buy it. There are only so many really smart people in the world. Why not collect them all?
Other initiatives I had shepherded also fell foul of the way Google did things. I had been at my job for more than a month and had just one project—the UI guidelines I had worked on with Karen White—that I could point to as an accomplishment. Of sorts.
My strikeouts were piling up. I prayed no one was watching the scoreboard.
Chapter 4
Marketing without "Marketing"
WHEN YOU'RE STARTING a company, it's pretty well understood what you need to do," Craig Silverstein assured me, speaking as an engineer and not a marketer. "You need to write tools to manage your workflow, you need to write a web server ... There are a lot fewer demands on your time, so it's really easy to crank out a lot of stuff when you're small."
The equivalent for a brand manager would be developing a logo, a tagline, some market positioning, and a plan for growing market share. We had a logo and seemed to be doing fine without a tagline, so I decided to focus on positioning and a marketing plan. I wasn't the first to put effort there.
Scott Epstein, the consultant Google hired in early 1999 to get marketing on track, succeeded in one important area—proving Larry and Sergey had the same distaste for traditional promotion that a vegan has for fatback. They rejected his plan to spend millions "building the brand," and when he slipped away into the night, they asked Cindy to shoulder responsibility for communications. As a PR person, Cindy saw the value in building an audience through word of mouth instead of spreading money like a layer of manure across the advertising wasteland. Google had a great story to tell, and public relations could harvest bushels of low-hanging fruit before we shoveled out cash for ads. All she needed was a little help.
"In late summer '99, we had such a hard time getting anyone to return our calls or to take us seriously," Cindy later recalled. "We did hire one firm, but we had to let them go because they only worked with clients that allowed them to invest, and Larry and Sergey said no.* That set us in the direction of going it alone—hire a small team, build institutional knowledge, and establish direct relationships with the media, analysts, and influencers." But in a classic chicken-and-egg conundrum, the media wouldn't talk to Google, because Google wasn't a company people were talking about.
"I contacted both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Merc," Cindy said. "I just wanted to get a relationship established. The Chron never called me back. I finally got hold of someone on the business desk at the Merc who told me they would not be covering Google because our Palo Alto office was 'too far north.'"
Growing by word of mouth suited Larry and Sergey's animosity toward advertising. They scoffed at profligate startups and their Superbowl spots, because TV ads lacked accountability. You could dump millions and not know if you had converted a single viewer into a user. Engineers rebelled against such inefficient excess in the name of "brand building."
"Brand is what's left over when you stop moving forward," was a sentiment engineer Matt Cutts heard expressed in a meeting with Larry and Sergey. It was only when a product stopped working better than the competition that branding became a factor. By then you'd already lost. For a long time, Larry refused to even use the B-word—because "branding" implied that technology alone was insufficient for success.
My marketing plan would change that. Larry and Sergey would see all the ways in which we could get the attention of users and companies and convince them to try Google. I sat staring at my monitor with my feet on my door-desk and my keyboard in my lap and started typing.
"Google's ultimate goal," I wrote, "is to become a mass market search solution, directly serving end users as well as supplying search technology to other destination sites." Then I started laying out the marketing initiatives that would take us there.
So, What's the Plan?
My first week, I asked Cindy for a copy of Google's strategic plan. She just looked at me. Google didn't have a strategic plan. Other than the handful of PowerPoint slides used to secure our venture capital, nothing existed in writing about what the company was trying to accomplish. It all resided in the heads of Larry and Sergey, who were never in the mood to discuss it.
I found a copy of the VC presentation, and sure enough, our strategy was right on the opening slide—a Doonesbury cartoon in which entrepreneur Bernie says, "Look at the search engine guys. They've got no hard assets, just software that drives everyone crazy. And yet they have market values in the billions! Of course, if someone comes along with a smart search engine, one that actually works, those companies evaporate overnight."
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.
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Page 6