Analyst Safa Rashtchy declared that the battle for audience share was over and that "Yahoo would probably accurately claim that they won, with something like 200 million worldwide users."† Yahoo must have felt far enough in the lead to keep working with us. In November 2002, they renewed their contract with Google. In fact, they expanded Google's presence, making us the primary source of their search results instead of delivering results from their own directory first. That came at a cost.
Miriam Rivera, the Google attorney who had worked herself to exhaustion on our AOL deal, also worked the Yahoo renewal. She remembers Yahoo being wary of Google to the point of paranoia and hesitant to strengthen us as a competitor. As a result they put the screws in. Hard. "I would not have done the deal," she said, reiterating what she had told Larry, Sergey, and Eric at the contract-review meeting. "They wanted an open kimono from us, where we would alert them to all the technology we had in development. They wanted parity—everything we developed, they would get too." Miriam didn't think it wise to constrain ourselves that way. Besides, our billion-dollar deal with AOL made the tens of millions Yahoo offered seem insufficient compensation for all they sought in return.
In the end, Omid's friendship with Udi Manber at Yahoo and Larry and Sergey's desire to stay on Yahoo's good side won out. Keep your friends close, went the strategy, and keep your enemies closer. We accepted the offered terms. From that point on, we had to notify Yahoo before we launched any new feature. When Miriam went on vacation, she carried a copy of the contract with her and took calls day or night about product-disclosure issues. Given Google's aversion to process, it upset everyone that we now had to check with our competitor before moving ahead on new technology.
The relationship began on rocky terms—a marriage of convenience that bound the partners together so neither could run too far ahead of the other. It was a relationship between a fading name and a rising star and destined to fall apart. Just a month later, in December 2002, Yahoo bought our competitor Inktomi and began working to replace Google's search results once and for all.
Chapter 22
We Need Another Billion-Dollar Idea
THERE," CINDY SAID to Jonathan Rosenberg, pointing toward the parking lot. "That's my car." As she spoke, a stretch Hummer rounded the corner, impossibly long and large. It had once been white, but now it was coated with mud from hood to trunk. We had added that finishing touch at Cindy's request, and she was pleased with our efforts. It was a complete and utter mess. Jonathan looked stunned for a moment, then laughed and picked up a bucket and a sponge and began swiping at the mud-covered windows. That's when we unleashed the water balloons.
Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google to bring structure to product management. He arrived none too soon. By the spring of 2002, the PMs were driving me nuts. In one twenty-four-hour period, I found myself in the middle of disputes between PMs and engineering, PMs and advertising support, and PMs and other PMs. Communication among our swelling groups kept slipping into darkness and dragging marketing along with it.
Jonathan had the unenviable task of corralling not just the new hires but also big-name old-timers like Susan, Salar, and Marissa, all of whom now ostensibly reported to him. They didn't always act that way. It was a classic syndrome of a startup becoming a real company—old-timers refusing to acknowledge that there were new rules to play by. One of those rules for every engineering and product-management employee was filing snippets, the weekly reports of projects currently under way and the progress that had been made on them since the previous week. Snippets were compiled and distributed automatically, and the software that did this had been written to insert snide comments about those who failed to file.
Jonathan wanted his product-management group to improve its compliance, and being extremely competitive, he decided the best way to encourage his staff and bond them together as a team was to challenge Cindy and her corporate marketing group to a contest. The head of the group ending the quarter with the lower percentage of snippets filed would have to wash the other manager's car while the winning team assaulted the loser with water balloons. We became the first group in the company to attain a one hundred percent filing rate, an eventuality that Schwim, who had coded the system, had never anticipated.
When the day of reckoning arrived, we came prepared with Super Soakers, a blender churning out margaritas, and a boom box belting out carwash tunes. Jonathan was soon sopping wet and making little progress on the task at hand. He looked mortally betrayed when members of his own team joined in the assault against him. Cindy, sensing things were getting out of hand, stepped in and grabbed a sponge, putting an end to the deluge.
We had wanted to see Jonathan share our pain. Our lives had changed with his structured approach to product management. In July 2002, he reorganized his division and introduced the roles of APM (associate product manager) and PMM (product marketing manager) and promptly went on a hiring binge.* There were suddenly many more flavors of PMs, and they all needed more from me and my marketing colleagues. It was convenient to blame Jonathan for the hailstorm of their demands and for their apparent belief that we had no projects on our plates other than theirs.
It was all part of a shift that Eric Schmidt had outlined at our first mid-quarter ops review back in May, a meeting held at a restaurant adjacent to the municipal golf course just down the road. Lunch was lasagna. Forty of us—mid-level managers and execs—had gathered in a low-tech conference room that was sunny and hot. We kept the door open, despite the threat of ducks wandering in off the putting green and the irritating "beep—beep—beep" of golf carts backing up just outside. Sergey sat at the front wearing a spandex biking shirt and shorts. Every few minutes he would launch a tiny remote-controlled flying saucer/hovercraft and send it careering around the room or try to make it hover over Larry's head. Susan coordinated the meeting, keeping time on presentations to ensure we stayed on schedule.* Eric kicked off the meeting by laying out the "Google Great Company Five," the areas we needed to get right in order to become a great company: global sales, strong brand and ethics, great financials, a good hiring process, and innovation.
No major initiatives resulted directly from the get-together, but it marked, as Eric called it, "a phase change in our evolution." We were consciously leaving behind our startup days and becoming a big company that made plans, communicated them to key managers, and then reviewed them on a scheduled basis. Eric established a mailing list called "VIPs" for directors and vice-presidents to keep us informed and to solicit input. And he offered a few directives of his own.
"Get a checkup," he instructed David Drummond. It had been a while since David had been to a doctor, and Eric wanted to be sure everyone was in good health for the challenges ahead.
"Buy a house with broadband," he lectured Bart Woytowicz, who complained about his slow Internet access at home. "Every one of you needs DSL or cable access."
"Develop better metrics for everything—from hiring women engineers to advertiser conversion rates," he reminded all of us. "And look for things we can patent."
I came away from the ops review determined to button down our marketing efforts and make them more systematic. My focus would be on supporting our revenue initiatives. And growing our international presence. And distilling our brand message. I had already put a fair amount of work into all three, but had really nailed the last one. The day before the offsite, I had sent our executives a list of five thematic messages for all Google communications—a distillation of a discussion I had been leading in our Baby Beagle group over the previous six months. We had started off looking for an alternative to "portal" to describe our business and ended up looking more deeply into our core identity as an institution.
"Google drives better decisions," I wrote. "Google technology makes things more accurate, while making them easier to use. Google is ubiquitous. Google creates information marketplaces. Google is a clear channel for information." I offered brief explanations and showed how each point related to core elements
for our business, from our mission statement to our privacy policy. I suggested we brand our approach to problem solving as "GoogleLogic," a blanket identifier incorporating all of Google's unique attributes-a one-word answer to any question about how or why we did what we did. Our new secret sauce, if you will.
I believed I had identified the deep benefit of our brand for users (enabling better decisions) and developed an identity in GoogleLogic broad enough to encompass everything from our technology to our hiring process. It moved us well beyond PageRank, the name for Larry's original ranking algorithm. PageRank only applied to Google's search engine, and even there it had been largely supplanted over time. GoogleLogic positioned us on a much bigger playing field of products and services. And it had that nice echo of the g and the l, almost as if "Google" and "logic" were mirrored halves of the same entity.
Jonathan and Cindy and Susan sent positive feedback, but I heard nothing from Larry or Sergey. I pinged them a couple of days later. Still no response. When, after another two months, I finally pushed Sergey for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, I did it as an "assumptive sale": I assumed it was okay to publish our five thematic messages company-wide unless anyone had objections.
"I have an objection," came Sergey's long-awaited reply. "I think they need more thought." That was it. I'd been down this path before. I trapped him in his office and demanded more specific direction.
"Doug," he said, "I think you're slipping back into your old big-company ways. I don't know where this came from, but I don't see any point to it. Why do we need this kind of thing?"
Uh. Buduh. Duh. He apparently had no recollection of the six months of updates our Baby Beagle group had been sending him.
"I will not smite Sergey," I counseled myself. "I will not smite Sergey." I walked him through the process and the applications for a unified messaging strategy with press and our users. I explained the benefits of having a positioning platform that we could build brand extensions on. He shrugged. He didn't see it, but if it was that important to me, fine. I could post it on the marketing page on MOMA. I was glad to have such an enthusiastic endorsement from the man who, just a week before, had been named "Marketer of the Year" by Marketing Computers magazine.
And, of course, Sergey turned out to have a point. I had convinced myself that our engineers would love the concept of GoogleLogic. They didn't. It wasn't impressive enough. They suggested "GoogleMagic!" Now that, they said, had some punch to it.
Other than my colleagues in PR, no one at Google was thinking much about our messaging strategy. Not yet. It wasn't all that important to people focused on building products, even when George Reyes joined us as chief financial officer in September 2002—crossing another big item off our pre-IPO checklist. Presumably, if we ever went public, we'd need some coherent story to tell Wall Street, but no one seemed terribly concerned about that now.
I put it aside and dove into working with sales on winning more advertisers and helping our PMs prepare the products they were pushing through the pipeline. Tim Armstrong and his salespeople always seemed grateful for any effort we made on their behalf. Jonathan's group just got hungrier for more. We had a continual tug of war over who would do what and what was reasonable to expect, and Jonathan got tired of it. So when I copied him on a note confirming who would write a customer newsletter, his short fuse burned down to powder and he blew up.
"I don't want to get in an email debate over who owns what," he stormed to the group. "I can't get into monthly debates over ownership." There had been no debate in this case, just a reiteration of responsibilities. Unbeknownst to Jonathan, there was a performance issue with a member of marketing that needed to be documented in writing. My note had been intended in part to do that. Given Jonathan's VP role and his growing reputation as a forceful personality, it would have been easy to bow my head abjectly and apologize for the perceived error of my ways. I may have mentioned that I come from a stiff-necked people.
"Whoa," I responded, then let Jonathan know he had misinterpreted the intent of the email and that he was the only one sensing a conflict. I offered to take it offline with him if he thought clarifying responsibilities delayed execution rather than accelerating it. He backed down and came as close to an apology as he could without actually saying he was sorry. He privately explained his frustration about having a new team that had yet to mesh and seemed to be taking longer than necessary to get things done.
After that incident, we reached an understanding. Jonathan could be loud, insistent, and overbearing at times with his own staff, who seemed wary of his mercurial mood shifts. With me, though, he adopted a paternal air (despite my being three years older) and offered some level of respect—perhaps because I had not hesitated to return his fire.
So when Jonathan established a "chain gang" comprising new members of his team, he offered to have them work on low-level tasks in my department, such as checking that our partners were using our logo properly on their sites. Likewise, I offered his PMs my first-born son, Adam. At age fourteen, he needed something to get him out of the house over summer break. Jonathan threw some assignments Adam's way and, though he was too young to be paid, gifted him with a new iPod when the work was done.
I appreciated Jonathan's generosity and took his eccentricities in stride. "Look, I'm on a scooter!" he once shouted as he rode past Sergey and a reporter interviewing him. Later he told me he wanted the reporter to write about the wacky ways of Googlers—not one of the key messages in Cindy's PR plan.
"Look! I'm a human pop-up ad!" he exclaimed on another occasion, walking in front of me as I presented to a group of Wharton MBA candidates.
"Ladies and gentlemen, our VP of product management," I murmured as he strode on down the hall followed by their incredulous stares.
And I definitely picked up on tension between Cindy and Jonathan over his ambition to do greater things at Google. The first logical way to expand his empire would be to annex Cindy's small corporate marketing group. She made it clear that issues in his own backyard needed addressing before he made any moves toward her domain. "I was hoping you would tell us the next step," she pointedly responded when he offered to help resolve an issue about pricing for the Google Search Appliance (GSA). "Maybe a conversation with your PM? Or some decisive action?" At other times her tone was even terser, as when she insisted that she needed to interview any candidate for a job with "marketing" in the title. The tension ebbed and flowed with shifts in the overall barometric pressure within the Plex. One day Cindy and Jonathan were rivals, the next, the closest of colleagues.
My own issues with Jonathan's group settled into a low simmer and I hoped to keep them there. I admonished my group not to wallow in an us-versus-them mentality regarding the PM group. I admitted my own sins in demonizing Jonathan's team and suggested we focus on getting things done, not on the obstacles that might stand in our way. I said that if my direct reports came to me with a complaint about a colleague's demands or behavior, I would first ask if they had addressed the issue with the person involved and what thoughts they had about solutions.
Those rules didn't apply in product management, however. When Marissa felt too much marketing attention was being paid to the GSA at the expense of her Google.com initiatives, she came straight to Cindy. In particular, she felt we weren't sufficiently supportive of Krishna Bharat's soon-to-be-launched Google news service, a product in which she had developed a special interest. At the same time, the GSA team hammered us daily for more ways to generate sales leads, despite the relatively small revenue the Search Appliance represented. In trying to balance the needs of two different product groups, I was pleasing neither. I informed Cindy that going forward I would focus more effort on consumer marketing for Google.com, and I began thinking about ways to do that without spending any money on advertising.
I could not deny, though, that Jonathan was putting in place a strong and disciplined structure for product management. He understood the data-driven decision-making mindset of our corporate le
aders and gave us sound guidance on how to move projects past them. "Board members don't want lists of possible ideas," he pointed out as we prepared a presentation about getting more users to download the Google toolbar. "They just want to know exactly what we're going to do and when we're going to do it." Time and again he sent slides back for more data, until they were dense with numbers and graphs and pointed to inescapable conclusions.
I learned things by listening to him. But that didn't stop me from bringing my bazooka-sized water gun from home and unloading on him as he washed Cindy's car.
The influx of PMs, APMs, and PMMs filling out Jonathan's org chart reinforced Google's meritocratic culture. Most were young. All had impressive credentials. Jonathan made sure everyone knew how high he had set the bar by distributing the résumés of those who had not made the cut. He wanted his staff to feel elite and Eric to rest assured there would be no bozo invasion on his watch. All these brilliant tyros caught on campuses and released in our cube farm impressed and unsettled me. Jonathan was right, I concluded. The quality of employees, at least on paper, was improving. I knew my questionable GPA and lonely BA would not make the cut if I had to meet Google's revised hiring standards.
I remember attending a product-review meeting in Larry and Sergey's office with Nikhil Bhatla, an APM so fresh out of Stanford that the ink on his sheepskin was still wet. When the meeting broke up, I stayed to harass Sergey about a marketing question he had been avoiding. Time like this was precious, because it was the only way to force decisions on issues not key to keeping the site up and running.
As the group filed out, I started making my case to Sergey, expecting to have five minutes mano-a-mano in which to persuade him. I was surprised when he looked over my shoulder at Nikhil, whose curiosity had caused him to linger. "What do you think of this idea?" Sergey asked him, then listened carefully as Nikhil laid out a cogent, well-argued response that poked enough holes in my idea to fill the Albert Hall.
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Page 37