The only nagging question had been whether the 1B index would cross the finish line with the incremental index running alongside it. It didn't. The incremental solution would continue to elude the Sisyphean efforts of the engineers for months to come. Google satisfied Yahoo with assurances that the incremental index would be completed quickly and that until it was, the new indexer would enable monthly updates to ensure freshness.
The Yahoo deal ended all my concerns about Google's future. We had momentum on our side and no visible obstacles in sight. If we could take Yahoo from Inktomi, who would stop us? I allowed myself to believe that I just might be living a Silicon Valley success story.
I called my mom and dad to tell them the news, since I wasn't sure the Internet had made it as far as Jacksonville. I hinted I might be able to pay back the money I had borrowed to buy my stock options. Not anytime soon, mind you, but someday.
All in the Family
My part in the Google-Yahoo tango played out weeks prior to the actual announcement. Omid wanted to cozy up to Yahoo by buying advertising from them as a gesture of good faith, so I scheduled the hundred banner ads I had created to run on their site. Sergey insisted I get the best return on our investment, even though he knew the ultimate goal was fostering good will. He directed me to buy untargeted run-of-site ads because they were cheaper than Yahoo's premium-content channels and because they gave us branding exposure even if nobody clicked on them. Did I mention they were also cheaper?
Yahoo, too, wanted to get the most out of our overture of friendship and resisted when I tried to negotiate lower rates for our buy. It was a difficult conversation in which I had to reconcile Sergey's deal-making directive to maximize value with our larger diplomatic goal of making Yahoo happy. I didn't want to push too hard, yet I felt an obligation not to roll over and accept whatever Yahoo felt they could get away with charging us. No matter what I negotiated, I knew Sergey would think we were paying too much. Then I discovered another complicating factor. The Yahoo sales rep assigned our account was married to David Krane, who had just been hired as Google's PR manager.
David was not the only Google executive in a mixed marriage, that is, one with a spouse working at a potential competitor. He wasn't even the only employee in the marketing department who had married outside the faith.
Let me give you an example of how convoluted and semi-incestuous Silicon Valley gets. We used the company eGroups to mass-mail our Google Friends newsletter to users, because Larry's brother, Carl, was one of eGroups' founders. Larry had done the configuration for the original eGroups server himself, and for a while the company's computational heart had lived under his desk. The same week we announced our deal with Yahoo, Yahoo announced they were buying eGroups for $428 million (Yahoo has been very kind to the Page family). With the integration of eGroups into Yahoo Groups, we began experiencing problems with our newsletter, from formatting issues to administrative headaches. Luckily, one of the software engineers absorbed into Yahoo with eGroups also had a connection to Google marketing. He was Cindy's husband. When our situation was dire and normal channels of communication failed, Cindy's "special friend" could usually help us get our problems addressed.
Silicon Valley is a Petri dish filled with amoeba-like corporations absorbing and digesting smaller technology firms, only to find themselves absorbed or growing large enough to split off their own subsidiaries. Employers have a penchant for hiring from the same pool of candidates over and over again, so everyone ends up working with everyone else at some point, or at least working for the same companies. Job-hopping is encouraged—no, expected—since no one place could possibly be interesting and innovative enough for an entire career. That's why the question Sergey asked when he interviewed me for the job was not "Why do you want to leave the Mercury News?" but "Why did you wait so long?"
No wonder social networking took root here; we're one big interconnected family whose members are always happy to find out how we're related to one another. "He's a first employer once removed on the Intel side." "She used to be my assistant at Sun, but she left me for some hot new startup over in Cupertino." A surprising number of tech workers have friends and lovers with whom they share intimacy but not the details of their office lives.
Google was no more immune to the lure of fraternization within the building than it was to relationships that crossed competitive lines. There were romances. There were marriages. On occasion, there were affairs. My sense is that the number of these dalliances was not out of line with a normal distribution in a population the size of Google's, especially one as densely populated with energetic young overachievers. It would be indiscreet for me to go into the details of people's private lives beyond what the participants have acknowledged publicly—and it would also be largely irrelevant, since office relationships had little effect on the course of the company. Usually, anyway. I did detect the tidal force of one pairing tugging at my ability to get my job done.
Larry and Sergey's insistance on seeing performance metrics for marketing redoubled with the addition of our ad buy on Yahoo. They began a drumbeat of demands for better measurement of our customer-acquisition techniques. What about the promotional text on our homepage? Which messages converted the most newbies to regular users? Testimonials? Promises? Comparisons? How many ads did they click? How many searches did they do?
The only way to answer these questions was to generate the homepage dynamically—essentially to implement code that would give us the ability to deliver variant versions of the homepage to users who came to our site. That would enable us to show different users different text and then track what they did after they saw it.
Larry gave me the task of writing the text to be displayed in April 2000 and assigned the coding of the dynamic homepage to Marissa. A logs team would generate the report on how many new users came back. While it took me a long time to get signoff on the homepage messages I wrote, dynamic homepage generation proved even more elusive. Soon every conversation I had with Larry turned into an inquisition about the conversion-rate test.
"Doug, when are we going to see those numbers?" he'd ask me. "We're wasting money because we're not effectively using our most powerful promotional medium."
The conversion-rate test was one of my main OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), and each time I had to tell Larry I had no data, a bit more of my credibility crumbled. I used every method at my disposal to jump-start the project, but I simply couldn't get the priority moved high enough. The only one who could move things along was Marissa, and it had been announced at TGIF that she and Larry were now a couple. Finally, in late August, I trudged upstairs to camp outside Larry's office. I waited until he was alone, then entered and closed the door behind me.
"Larry, I've begged, cajoled, and demanded," I said, "but the dynamic homepage code still hasn't been implemented so we can test conversion rates. Can you recommend some other approach?" I was frustrated and nervous and didn't hide it very well. I was admitting I couldn't get something done. At Google, that was not a career-enhancing move. And I felt uncomfortable telling the company president that the obstacle in my way was the engineer he was dating. Larry listened quietly to my concerns.
"Don't worry, Doug," he reassured me with a broad smile. "We'll work something out." Then he put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a gentle shake, and guided me to the door. It was a strange moment for me. Larry's earnestness emanated in waves, as if he wanted to let me know that he understood the unspoken dilemma I faced, that he and I were all right and that the situation would be all right, and that he would take care of things. I went back to my desk unsure what to do next. What if other issues came up with Marissa? I could already see that we had differing perspectives about our brand. Would I have to go to Larry for resolution each time we disagreed?
Coincidentally or not, within days the dynamic homepage coding was completed. In theory, anyway. We still needed a script so webmaster Karen could run the program on her Windows machine. That took several more wee
ks. Then the logs team had problems extracting the user data we needed. The first actual report wasn't ready until November.
I never believed that my engineering colleagues were intentionally neglecting my number one priority. Any of a thousand projects competing for their attention could legitimately take precedence over a marketing request. And as hard as Larry and Sergey rode marketing, they rode the engineers harder. The founders were engineers, after all, and they understood what engineers could do. They just didn't understand why our engineers weren't doing it faster, and they let them know so.
The feedback to our group was more ambiguous.
"Marketing should be less risk averse," Larry said.
"And more creative," Sergey added.
"And more productive," they concluded.
Cindy kept us informed when marketing's inability to make things happen was a topic for discussion at the executive level. It seemed to come up frequently.
"Don't let anything hold you up for eventual delivery," Cindy wrote in my six-month review. "Figure out the fastest way to get it done. And don't let your signature high standards slip!"
"Absolutely," I assured her. But without engineering support, some things just weren't going to happen, and support from engineering only came when a project was endorsed by Larry or Sergey. Negotiating personal relationships to gain their blessing added a complicating factor.
Google was a company that enforced closeness more than most, from overpopulated workspaces to shared meals to all-company ski trips to constant electronic accessibility twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We saw a lot of one another and often became good friends—but close quarters also drove people apart. Peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies became inescapable irritants. Privacy was hard to come by, and personal hygiene took on added importance. There were undercurrents of annoyance and avoidance and sometimes overt expressions of exasperation as the pressure to perform intensified. In the midst of all that, people fell in love and out of love, formed lifelong bonds and ended their marriages. For some, Google became more a lifestyle than an employer.
I liked coming to work. I liked my job. I liked the challenges. I liked the energy, and I liked my coworkers—with whom I was spending more hours than with my family. But for me the Googleplex was just a place to get things done. I was a forty-one-year-old man, married, with three kids, two cars, a cat, and a mortgage. I already had a home.
Chapter 12
Fun and Names
SERGEY SAT WITH Susan in the front of the aluminum canoe I was steering down the Russian River in Sonoma County. It was September 2000, and I was using all the navigational skills I had picked up at sleep-away camp to keep us clear of rocks and overhanging branches. Around us other Googlers fired super soakers and shouted gleefully when someone ran aground or capsized.
"paddle closer to Larry's canoe," Sergey urged me as he stripped off his shirt and positioned himself near the side. In an instant, he was out of the canoe and swimming toward his co-founder, grabbing for the gunwale of his boat—splashing and rocking it as if to tip it over—before heading off to attack one of the other engineers.
When we reached the last sandbar two hours later, Larry was waiting to take his revenge. While I pulled the canoe up onto the beach, he came running toward us through the shallow water.
"Hah," I thought. "Sergey's going down."
I was caught totally by surprise when Larry bypassed Sergey and tackled me instead, sending me sprawling into the water. I had never been subjected to a physical attack by a manager before. It was the kind of rambunctious roughhousing I associated with adolescent boys. I came out of the water smiling. The canoe trip was intended to forge closer ties among Googlers and to break us out of our crusty cubicle-enclosed lives. It was company-mandated fun, but it was fun.
I may have given the impression to this point that Google was a relentless pressure cooker in which we gave every ounce of sweat and passion to advance the greater good envisioned by our brilliant, demanding founders. That's pretty accurate. A very pregnant project manager—overcome by exhaustion—apologized to me for not answering an email I sent her after midnight. She shamefacedly admitted she had fallen asleep. However, Google was also a great place to hang out, filled with interesting people who were physically active and quick of wit.
"I want Urs for my boat," engineer John Bauer punned when we were choosing canoe-trip buddies. "I can't row without him."
"Unfortunately the root is defunct now," Jeremy Chau nerdily joked about a tree that fell in the parking lot. "Should we take a look at the log?"
We held an employee contest to guess the first day we would do a hundred million searches, with the winner riding away on a new electric scooter. We had a spring-cleaning ice-cream social and a flood of geeky jokes. ("How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?" "None. They just declare Darkness™ the standard.")
When Karen took a vacation, we ordered a thousand plastic playground balls and filled her cube with them. They were still being thrown from office to office and rolling around under desks a year later.
For Mardi Gras, Charlie adorned the café with beads and cooked little plastic babies into king cakes. On Cinco de Mayo we tasted crawfish and sweet potato tamales washed down with horchata and sweet sangria.
For Halloween we had blood-clot punch with life-sized baby dolls floating in the bowl (Charlie had a fetish for food garnished with infants) and a parade of tasteless costumes including choirboys with sinner priests, bloodied plane-wreck casualties, and oozing shark-bite victims—and those were just the outfits worn by our not-so-politically-correct HR manager, Heather.
And we had groupies. Tourists in Linux t-shirts took souvenir photos under the Google sign by our front door—proof that Yahoo had put us on the map and that our brand was striking a chord deeper than that of a typical tech company.
It seemed I merely had to stand up and walk a few paces away from my chair in any direction to experience something new and entertaining.
"Cock rings? I overheard one sales rep ask another as I passed her cube. "How many of those do we have? And vibrators? How many can we come up with for that?"
"There must be a supply cabinet I don't know about," I thought. "Or perhaps I forgot to sign up for the mailing list about after-work parties."
Adult services advertisers, I learned when I asked, were among our earliest customers. They needed to know how many ad impressions we could deliver targeted to the words that defined their businesses. The sales reps had been checking the "inventory" of projected searches for those keywords. Google was not the place to work if you had delicate sensibilities.
The lighter moments helped make the load bearable, but it was the boldness of our business initiatives that really got my blood flowing and kept me from feeling trapped in a thankless grind. I never knew when some fastball would smack me in the head and reset my thinking yet again.
Say What You Will
"What the hell are you thinking?" I asked Larry when he explained his idea for a new do-it-yourself advertising system.
The engineers had continued to innovate on our initial CPM ad system, beginning with placing ads on the right-hand side of search results in addition to those at the top of the page. The next step, Larry informed us, would be a feature that made it possible for anyone to create right-hand-side ads and post them live on Google within minutes. We would have guidelines and terms and conditions, but we would start running ads before verifying they were in compliance. In effect, anyone with a valid credit card could make an ad that said anything.
Anyone. Anything.
"How in the world is our brand going to survive racist, pornographic, and defamatory ads?" I protested. "They're bound to show up on our results pages. Do we want our brand to be associated with hate speech and worse? I have a very bad feeling about this."
Larry's decision to let user-created ads go live on our site without review convinced me he occupied some alternative and severely distorted reality. To all
ow the publication of unscreened ads was a classic marketing crisis in the making. Any fool could see that. Evidently, I was that fool.
Others shared my incredulity. One engineer was so appalled by the plan that he considered writing a letter to the VCs on the board informing them we were about to lose all the money they had invested in us. Chad Lester—the omnivore engineer—however, celebrated our founder's risk tolerance.
"I was excited about it," Chad told me after the fact. "It was like high school and TP-ing someone's house. Why not try it and see what happens?"
I'd seen managers build consensus before moving ahead with unpopular decisions, and I knew bosses who dipped their toes in untested waters, fully prepared to pull out quickly if the temperature rose above or dropped below their comfort level. This was a different kind of leadership. Larry was so suffused with conviction that he simply brushed aside opposition and ran toward risk without fear or hesitation. He was absolutely convinced that unfiltered ads were the right thing to do.
In retrospect, Larry's and Chad's zeal may reflect the difference in our stages of life. I was a middle-aged father with a lot to lose if Google died on the vine. Chad and Larry were just beginning their careers. They could afford to flame out in Silicon Valley, where bold failures earn more respect than incremental success.
Not all mid-life guys are too conservative to survive startups, but to be successful you have to love uncertainty the way Chad loved pork chops. You need enormous reserves of energy to undertake everything thrown your way—along with the confidence to bounce back each time you fall off the high wire and hit the ground hard. I had moved to Nagoya before I could speak Japanese and to Novosibirsk without a word of Russian. I'd jumped from a steady job at the Merc to an unsecured position in an unknown company without a safety net. I didn't fear the unknown. Neither did I want to see my brave new world implode because of reckless, ill-considered decisions. I found it increasingly difficult to judge what fell into that category.
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Page 22