Crispin sent a team to spend a day interviewing senior engineers on our campus. A few weeks later, they came back with a presentation full of cutting edges and radiant brilliance.
They had realistic Google ID badges with pictures of real Google engineers on the front and coding challenges on the back to be solved and sent with résumés to our HR department. They planned to drop them in classrooms at top engineering schools.
They had a plan to get Google mentioned on The Simpsons.*
They had a billboard that was simply a mathematical equation followed by ".com." No logo or identification. Those who solved the equation and entered the solution as a web address would get another puzzle and ultimately a Google recruiting page.
They had a series of print ads with photos purporting to be from Google's office, where parking a car, sending a fax, or getting snacks from a vending machine required solving complex puzzles. Readers were invited to send in their solutions along with their job applications.
They had a plan to rebrand our recruiting effort as "Google labs," to emphasize we were working on much more than search, which many in our target audience considered to be an already-solved problem. To make that evident, they incorporated a handwritten "Labs" as an exponent above and to the right of our Google logo.
They proposed a "Google Labs Aptitude Test" (GLAT) to be inserted in school newspapers and magazines like Science and the MIT Technology Review.
Larry and Sergey didn't hate it. In fact, they were amused. One of the few elements they nixed was a video campaign called "Watch Your Ass," which showed gritty handheld-camera footage of Google recruiters hunting down engineering talent with dart guns and nets at their workplaces. It was too dark.
"Be careful not to upset those we don't end up hiring," was the gist of the founders' feedback. "Don't insult them if they can't solve the puzzles." For the rest, they gave the okay to go ahead. I quietly rejoiced. I had sold a branding campaign from the nation's hottest ad agency to two guys who hated anything to do with marketing. It had taken four years, but I had figured out a way to work the system.
The implementation of the campaign was almost flawless. Since challenging engineers fell outside Crispin's area of expertise, two Googlers, Curtis Chen and Wei-Hwa Huang (a four-time winner of the World Puzzle Championship), came up with most of the puzzles we used. I helped a bit.
"Write a haiku describing possible methods for predicting search traffic seasonality," I suggested for one.
"This space left intentionally blank. Please fill it with something that improves on emptiness," I offered for another.
For Wei-Hwa's question about the number of different ways to color an icosahedron with one of three colors on each face, I added, "What colors would you choose?" There were also nods to Chef Charlie, "Don't be evil," and an old computer game involving twisty, turny passages that I had played as a kid.
As we rolled out new elements in the campaign over 2004, the press ate it up. NPR, ABC, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Sixty Minutes, and the Associated Press gave us widespread positive coverage and extended the reach of our effort substantially. Our own engineers praised the effort as fun and Googley. We received more than four thousand job applications at the specific email address we had set up. Everything worked exactly as I had hoped except for one small glitch.
We only hired one engineer because of the ads.
We had problems tracking applicants who sent in GLAT forms on paper and no way of knowing how many people the ads inspired to apply through our normal jobs@google channel. The ultimate number of hires may have been substantially greater, but I didn't have data to prove it. The branding effort worked. The recruiting component didn't.
Alan Eustace, the engineering director overseeing recruitment, didn't care. He wanted to run a modified campaign the following year. Urs liked the idea as well. The new head of business operations, however, didn't see it that way. The budget had come out of her department, and she had nothing concrete to show for it. I understood why she concluded it was a "complete waste of money," but I saw it differently.
For the rest of the year I tried to find a way to put Crispin back to work on promoting our brand, but the Google world had changed again. Now HR had recruiting specialists and Jonathan's product-marketing managers owned promotion of individual products. I could advise on branding, but they were responsible for the bottom-line performance. The PMMs were shopping for ad agencies, primarily to help with international promotion, which was a weak point for Crispin. And managers in Jonathan's domain—thinking outside the box—proposed we trade user data in aggregate for agency services. The agency would get inside information on the booming search-advertising market and we would get cheap ads. Win-win.
I disliked the idea. Giving out user data to cut costs seemed like a bad trade to me. But the loudest voice against it came from Marissa. For once we were standing on the same side of the fence. We had bickered in the past over issues of style, but we had never disagreed that our relationship with users was sacrosanct. Nothing should jeopardize their trust in us. Google's growth had brought in a new wave of managers, who were not "the bozos" Eric Schmidt had feared, but neither were they grounded in our core values. The PMs were impressed by the big international agencies that came wearing suits and bearing lofty titles. I wasn't. Crispin did some test campaigns for us, but their lack of global capabilities kept them out of the running. They moved on.* So did I.
Chapter 25
Mistakes Were Made
WE FIND OURSELVES today at the forefront of tremendous opportunity and worldwide attention," Sergey announced in October 2003. "This is, of course, an enviable position, yet it comes with substantial costs and risks."
Sergey wanted us to know that he understood how overwhelmed we might be feeling by the demands and issues coming at us from all angles. He didn't want us to become reactive and lose our ability to maintain the edge that had brought us so far. Prioritize, he instructed us. Don't let projects linger. Say no clearly when the answer is no. Don't create needless work for others or send emails that aren't worth reading. And he urged us to take care of our health and our families. Google, he assured us, wanted us to be productive and happy.
I was pretty happy at the end of November when my newly split shares fully vested. They were mine, though I couldn't do anything but admire their number in our online accounting system. Oh man. How incredibly liberating. I had no intention of leaving Google, but knowing that if I did leave I'd still fully benefit from an IPO eased some of the pressure I had been feeling. It put a spring in my step as I took my daily walk around the park.
"If the stock goes to thirty dollars," I mused, "I'll be worth X. If it goes to fifty, I'll be worth Y. Could it really go to fifty? What's Yahoo at? Ohmigod. What if it went to a hundred dollars a share? Nah. That could never happen." It was a fun game to play. I tried to wipe the goofy smile off my face by the time I got back to the office, but sometimes it would reappear of its own accord.
The office changed, too. We had completed our purchase of SGI's corporate headquarters in July 2003. In January 2004, it was corporate marketing's turn to follow engineering to our new home. I packed up my boxes on Friday and on Monday went to work in building 41. Not 42, which was where engineering lived, but next door and accessible by a series of elevated bridges and walkways that would have made a giant hamster feel right at home.
There weren't many corporate marketing folks left to move. Jonathan's product-management division had absorbed our internationalization group and our market researcher. I still managed Allegra, who was now our special events coordinator, and Dylan Casey, a marketing coordinator whose previous job had been cycling with Lance Armstrong on the US Postal Service racing team.
David Krane's PR group had grown considerably, with representatives in Google offices around the world, and Karen White, the webmaster, now had a much larger staff as well. I didn't mind that the branding group had not kept pace. Managing people always felt harder to me than doing the
work myself. I liked sitting in my darkened office with headphones on, thinking about our brand and how to make it shine. I also knew that at the rate the product-management team was adding PMMs—marketing managers who worked with the product team much as I had—my fate would be either induction into the collective or elimination as a redundancy. Organizations grow. They change. I didn't worry too much about it. I loved my job, but I had stock options and they were fully vested.
We had come a long way from our cramped quarters in the original Googleplex, with its cereal bins relabeled to read "Larry-O's," "Raisin Brin," and "porn Flakes," its intimate café with an unused cash register, and its walk-in-closet gym.
Our new facility had everything. There was a "Welcome home" pillow on my chair when I came in. We had a sand volleyball court, a bocce ball area, clean locker rooms, and an enormous café that doubled as our TGIF meeting space and included an upstairs balcony and an outdoor barbeque patio. There were a garden plot and an adjacent grassy field for Frisbee or soccer. There was even a mystery floor with a canted roof and oddly shaped windows creating a visual effect that nauseated the legal department staffers housed there. They quickly set up a portable bar and scheduled regular cocktail hours to ameliorate the effects.
There were snack rooms on every floor, foosball, Ping-Pong, and video games. Googlers brought in caged birds, threw camouflage netting over their cubes, and installed a traditional red British telephone booth purchased on eBay. We had massage chairs, massage rooms, and Japanese toilets featuring heated seats, "front cleansing," and built-in dryers. We had a stable housing a fleet of Segways and a video display Amit Patel created to show a spinning Earth with sample queries floating up from it in real time—each color-coded by language. And we had an enormous whiteboard on which any passing Googler could update "Google's secret plan" for taking over the world. It was filled with rumors, fake products, cartoons, and puns. Reporters sometimes asked if it was for real.
I always laughed. If it had been real, we would never have let them see it. Especially as, by the beginning of 2004, we were on the road to becoming a public company. Our obsession with secrecy had always been a shared cultural value. We didn't talk to anyone but other Googlers about what we did behind closed doors. Eventually we didn't even talk to them. When special key cards were suddenly required to access one engineering floor, the employees who worked there joked that they were working in the nude. By 2004, access to all information for all Googlers was no longer the norm.
Even MOMA, our free-for-all company intranet, began to show signs of becoming buttoned down. Our engineers had always obsessively collected every scrap of intelligence they could about what was happening within our servers. They analyzed it, kneaded it, and baked it into tasty little tidbits set out on MOMA where any Googler could consume them. The data was anonymized—you couldn't see individual queries or IP addresses, for example-but the number of searches, countries from which they originated, most popular search terms, and other key stats could all be viewed.
MOMA's homepage was originally dense and messy and full of numbers. At the center sat a large graph with colored lines labeled with the names of Muppet characters. The graph represented results quality across different search engines, and the top line, labeled "the Great Gonzo," belonged to Google. When another line veered close to ours, clarion calls could be heard above the gnashing of teeth, ordering that all energies be focused on improving the relevance of our results. Larry and Sergey never forgot that the quality of our search drove our success and never took for granted that our lead was insurmountable. Ironically, the lack of a good way to search MOMA made it hard to use at first, though Google finally hooked up one of its own search appliances to fix that problem.
The most useful aspect of MOMA for me was the phone list, which contained the title, email address, and photo of everyone on the payroll. My picture was there. Sort of. My original photo captured more reflected flash than facial features, so I swapped it out for a press photo of Deputy Director Skinner from The X-Files. The resemblance was eerie, and his picture conveyed the gravitas and focus my own photo lacked. Other MOMA photos showed samurai warriors and masked figures with titles like "Shadow Ops" and "Black Ops." Yoshka, Urs's Leonberger, was listed as "Google's top dog." New Googlers looking me up for the first time would inevitably email me, asking about my uncanny resemblance to Mulder's boss. I'd assure them that the truth was out there.
In fact, the truth was on MOMA. I came to assume that any information I needed about Google could be found on the intranet, from the status of products in development to the number of employees at any point in the company's history. It was a shared wellspring of data that all Googlers could tap to test hypotheses, build prototypes, and win arguments.
In mid-2003, Susan put some product plans and strategic documents on MOMA that required a password to access. She was concerned that the sales team might accidentally spill too much to clients. As head of product management, Jonathan told her to make the documents accessible because Google so strongly valued the free flow of information among staff members. Only performance appraisals and compensation were off limits. "This is extremely unusual for a company to do," Eric Schmidt often reminded us at our weekly TGIF meetings, "but we will continue trusting everyone with sensitive information unless it becomes a problem."
In September 2003, it became a problem. Information about our revenue numbers and Larry and Sergey's stock holdings started showing up in news reports. Eric immediately clamped down, telling Omid and me to stop including revenue numbers in TGIF presentations. Passwords on MOMA were no longer forbidden. It was a shame, Eric observed, that reality had finally come to Google.
The source for the stories turned out to be a low-level administrator feeding information to an outsider. She was asked to leave. In January 2004, though, long after that first small leak had been plugged, a much bigger crack appeared in our wall of secrecy. The same month we hired our first corporate security manager, John Markoff from the New York Times wrote a series of articles in which he reported details of products in development and the results of an internal audit conducted in preparation for a possible IPO. The information had been extremely confidential and closely held. The leak was ultimately traced to a senior manager who had known Markoff for years. He left the company as well, though the true reason for his departure was not made public, leading to much speculation.
From that point on, I had to ask for access to the project information I needed to do my job. It felt odd, as if with each ironclad, password-protected gateway the company installed, it locked out a little more of its original corporate culture.
Shortly before going public, Google clamped down completely. According to SEC rules, every employee who had access to intimate knowledge about the state of the business would be restricted from freely buying and selling the company's stock. I, and most others, gladly traded ignorance about our bottom line for the bliss of being able to cash out whenever we were ready to do so. The days of innocence in the garden of data had officially come to an end.
The Antisocial Network
In February 2004, Yahoo dropped Google and began using their own Inktomi-based search results instead. We barely noticed. We stretched in the skin of our new headquarters and settled in to a new level of hyper-productivity. Everything needed to be done right now and everything was very important. New people were climbing onboard every week and taking control of projects in motion.
Cindy kept an eye out for any signs the news cycle was turning against us. She urged us not to let cracks appear in the shiny gold sphere of Google's public image, and every few months she sent reminders to all Googlers that when the press came calling, the calls should be forwarded to PR. "There is no such thing as, 'off the record,'" she cautioned us, because "reporters are fiercely competitive and will tell you whatever you want to hear just to get the story." The last thing she needed was a very public slip on something as important as a new product launch. But sometimes things go wrong.
Orkut built his eponymous service entirely on his own. It was a prototype to gather data, to try things out, to experiment. He wrote the code, designed the user interface, set up the databases. He didn't intend for it to be a full-fledged Google product, so to accelerate the development, he used tools that were commonly available outside Google. They came from Microsoft. The server running orkut wasn't even located in a Google data center, but at the home of the weather site Wunderground.com. Orkut knew his system would never support Google-sized audiences, but it should safely scale to handle two or three hundred thousand users. Membership in orkut would be by invitation only, so he would be able to throttle growth by controlling the number of invitations the system distributed.
Marissa was the consumer product manager. She saw orkut as a small startup within Google, operating autonomously to prove that a single engineer with a new idea could build and test a product without enduring the delays of Google's increasingly bureaucratic development process. Larry and Sergey encouraged her to manage orkut as if it were an independent operation.
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Page 42