The Only Way to Win
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.
To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before
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-bra
nded 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.
Chapter 5
Giving Process Its Due
JANUARY 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.
"Found a problem," I thought. "Now fix it."
I set up an interdepartmental meeting to address the need for project prioritization and resource allocation. The marketing and business development departments, the two mighty legs upon which the company's future stood, would collaborate to construct a stable platform for growth. My office mate Aydin wanted in. So did Shari and Susan and a couple of others on the business side.
At our first meeting, we brainstormed process structures. We analyzed the competition, our overall market position, and where the industry as a whole was headed. It was a good meeting, a productive meeting, and at its end we were prepared to offer the strategic leadership Google lacked. How much market share could our process-fed Google gain? The world will never know.
Once Larry and Sergey heard that we intended to dictate product plans to engineering, they threw a monkey wrench at us. That wrench was Salar. He didn't kill our committee directly, but it died just the same. Salar said that Larry was fine with answering a list of questions to clarify our corporate strategy, but that product development would remain ad hoc until further notice.
Something must have gotten through, though, because the next day Sergey issued a company-wide manifesto of sorts, listing our top three priorities: "product excellence, user acquisition, and revenue." It wasn't much of an action plan. Nor did it answer broader questions like "How will we ensure user loyalty?" and "What is our market-expansion strategy?"
I stopped asking those questions eventually, as I became convinced our founders intended to pick a path to the future based on gut instinct, then haul ass through a fire swamp of competition with the entire company riding on their backs. Such a strategy required them to hold a degree of certainty in their own abilities.
"They had so much self-confidence that Sergey was convinced he personally could find a cure for AIDS," engineer Chad Lester marveled. And why not? With twenty-five million dollars in the bank, the founders' wild hubris was free to roam the plains. Life gives you few chances to make decisions as if no one else's opinion matters. Google offered just such an opportunity. Venture capitalists John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital sat on Google's board,* but the board didn't have control—that belonged to Larry and Sergey. All the board could do was try to guide them.
Larry and Sergey had anointed Cindy VP of corporate marketing and put her in charge of public relations and promotion, but not the development of products. The board wanted a different leader to build that organization—someone with technical savvy, but not an engineer. When engineers drive the gravy train, sometimes they focus on how fast they can go rather than where they're headed.
Larry and Sergey reluctantly agreed to take a look around, though no traditional consumer-marketing person could possibly impress them. The right candidate would have to be able to communicate with coders, execute quickly, and be very, very smart. And smell nice. Sergey once rejected an applicant in part because "I thought he had kind of a bad body odor."
Jonathan Rosenberg, an executive at Excite@Home, was very, very smart, and the board strongly hinted that he would be the best fit for Google's needs. Jonathan had other ideas and decided to stay at Excite for two more years before claiming the role of Google's vice president of product management. He left behind more than a résumé, though. He convinced Larry and Sergey that there might be a role for a product-management group if, and only if, it didn't usurp the divinely ordained primacy of engineering. God forbid that Google become a marketing-driven company. In marketing-driven companies, researchers identified customer needs and then product managers (PMs)* directed engineers to create products to fill those gaps. I had been taught that was a good thing to do.
"Let's do a gap analysis," I used to say at the Merc. "What's the unmet need? Where's the market opportunity? How much share can we gain?" Engineers hate that kind of thinking.
If you're an engineer with a brilliant idea, seeing it dumbed down or abandoned because it doesn't test well is like watching a bully pull the wings off a butterfly. The right thing to do is build it regardless, to prove that you can and because building cool things is—well, you end up with cool things.
Pure-hearted geeks flee the hellish realm of product-driven companies, where soul-sucking suits shuffle after profits instead of perfection and the boss doesn't understand any technology more complicated than a binder clip. There, product management rules, pandering to a public that hasn't a clue about what it really wants, while enslaved engineers make tiny improvements to cruft—crappy products wrapped in promotion and paraded before consumers like lipsticked pigs.
Larry and Sergey would not allow that at Google. Their company would appreciate the inherent beauty of inspired design in breakthrough technologies like a spell checker that recognized a hundred variations of the name "Britney Spears" or a calculator that could convert the speed of light into furlongs per fortnight. For that to happen, a Google PM would need to be someone smart enough to understand engineers but not intimidate or subordinate them. Someone the founders would feel comfortable having as a direct report. Someone who would stand up to them when need be, but who wouldn't waste their time with trivial concerns.
"I was the first person who wasn't an engineer working with engineering to define the product," Salar recalls. "We decided to call that product management."
Salar's transformation into a one-person department complemented the other process piece that fell into place in January 2000.
"The Internet is under-hyped," John Doerr had declared early in the dot-com boom. Silicon Valley listened, because Doerr's early investments through Kleiner Perkins in winners like Sun, Netscape, Compaq, and Amazon proved his uncanny acumen. Now, as one of our board members, he prescribed the best practices from his portfolio companies to beef up Google's anemic process management and tighten our flabby decision-making.
"We had a marvelous meeting this morning with John Doerr," Cindy said one day. "I was terrifically impressed with the thinking he's trying to instill in our guys."
Doerr's corporate growth regimen comprised a system for setting goals and measuring progress that he called Objectives and Key Results or OKRs. It was far more methodical than the ad hoc list of nebulous goals Sergey had unleashed on us just a week before.
"Objectives," Doerr instructed Larry and Sergey, "should be significant and communicate action. They state what you want to accomplish, while key results detail how you will accomplish those goals." Key results, therefore, should be aggressive, measurable, and time-specific. Doerr war
ned the founders not to overdo it: five objectives with four key results each should be sufficient.
Larry and Sergey's initial objectives included "move toward market leadership," "best search user experience," "meet or exceed revenue plan," and "improve internal organization." Those broad categories remained for many quarters, but the key results—the steps we would take to achieve them—kept changing, from "distribution deals adding half a million searches per day" to the "launch of Google in ten languages" and "CEO candidate selected."
If I wanted to see webmaster Karen White's priorities, or Cindy's or Larry's, I had only to call up the company phone list on our intranet (nicknamed "MOMA" by Craig Silverstein after the Museum of Modern Art) and click their names. It helped, because in the final days of the quarter everyone rushed to check things off their lists. If someone else's OKRs were contingent on me, I wanted to be forewarned they'd be hunting me down, and I wanted to know that the people whose help I would need to complete my own OKRs were aware of them.
In a company filled with overachievers, I assumed everyone would accomplish all their OKRs. No. It turned out that that would indicate failure. The ideal success rate was seventy percent, which showed we were stretching ourselves. Larry and Sergey assured us that missing OKRs wouldn't factor into performance reviews, because if they did we would take too few risks.
OKRs forced us to reevaluate priorities at least four times a year. If our industry changed or our corporate goals did, we had an obligation to bring out our near-dead initiatives and load them in the tumbrel. At the Merc, it had been nearly impossible to stop projects once they started. I had sat on a committee that decided our neighborhood news sections bled cash and should be put down, but for months no one found the will to pull the trigger. Not so at Google. Larry and Sergey expected instantaneous results, and products lived or died based on data, not sentiment.
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Page 7