Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Heather Cairns: To rule the Earth!? Here we are. There are seven people inside of someone’s house, working out of bedrooms, and that’s what they were saying then.

  Ray Sidney: The first Google digs was half of Susan Wojcicki’s house, including a garage.

  Heather Cairns: We were allowed to use Susan’s washer and dryer that was in the garage. But we were working out of bedrooms; we weren’t in the garage. That’s the folklore, because every start-up is supposed to be in a garage.

  David Cheriton: I’m tempted to say it was like a frat house, although I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a frat house. It was a long way from a professional company—frankly, once I invested I really didn’t have the sense for some time whether these guys were really taking the company routine seriously or not, so I used to say, “Well, I spent $200,000 on a T-shirt.”

  Heather Cairns: The parties would be rocking—like, they’d be rocking by anyone’s standards, let alone an office party standard. We’d have a hundred people come and we have props from movie theater companies. And we had a hot tub, too, so you can take it from there.

  David Cheriton: The office they had on University Avenue was a step in the right direction.

  Brad Templeton: It was this office space in downtown Palo Alto that had all the giant balloon chairs and stuff which became their motif.

  Marissa Mayer: The lava lamps were a thing because they came in every color of the Google logo. The bouncy balls were a posture thing, but also a fun thing.

  Charlie Ayers: The first time I met Larry and Sergey, Google was still headquartered over the bicycle shop on University Avenue. It didn’t look like a business whatsoever—it looked like a bunch of kids in their midtwenties, you know, just screwing around.

  Marissa Mayer: Charlie started when we moved over to the Shoreline campus.

  Charlie Ayers: I remember going in for an interview and Larry bounced on by on one of these big balls that have handles on them, like you buy at Toys“R”Us when you’re a kid. It was just a very unprofessional, uncorporation attitude. I have a pretty good understanding of doing things differently from the Grateful Dead—I’ve worked on and off with them over the years—but from my perspective, looking from the outside it was an odd interview. I’d never had one like that. I left them thinking that these guys are crazy. They don’t need a chef!

  Heather Cairns: I was very surprised that they hired this ex–Grateful Dead chef, since clearly everything that goes with that is coming with Charlie. Talk about a counterculture person!

  Charlie Ayers: Larry’s dad was a big Deadhead; he used to run the Grateful Dead hour talk show on the radio every Sunday night. Larry grew up in the Grateful Dead environment.

  Larry Page: We do go out of our way to recruit people who are a little bit different.

  Charlie Ayers: There was no under-my-thumb bullshit going on where you all had to dress and look and smell and act alike. Their unwritten tagline is like: You show up in a suit? You’re not getting hired! I remember people that they wanted showing up in suits and them saying, “Go home and change and be yourself and come back tomorrow.” A lot of companies wouldn’t have done that, but they were bent on being the new local color of the Silicon Valley. Before Google, Apple were the local-color guys, because they had the skull and crossbones flag flying on the roof. But then Google wanted to do that fuck-you-to-the-Man thing. Again, they were doing things no one else had done before in Silicon Valley. They were doing what they knew was right. I always thought of them like that. They’re really cool like that.

  Larry Page: We find that we have a really fun culture. We have a dog policy which we got from Netscape. It’s like a two-page document explaining what you can and can’t do with your dog at work.

  Heather Cairns: We said it was okay to bring pets to work one day a week. And what that did was encourage people to get lizards, cats, dogs—oh my God, everything was coming through the door! I was mortified because I know this much: If you have your puppy at work, you’re not working that much.

  Larry Page: We take the whole company on a ski trip to Tahoe every year.

  Douglas Edwards: We would go up to Squaw, and attendance was pretty much mandatory. That became the company thing.

  Ray Sidney: The very first ski trip was in the first part of 1999. That was definitely a popular event over the years.

  Charlie Ayers: I come from the world of the Grateful Dead, so I know how to party, and so on the ski trips in Squaw Valley I would have these unsanctioned parties and finally the company was like, “All right, we’ll give Charlie what he wants.” And I created Charlie’s Den. I had live bands, deejays, and we bought truckloads of alcohol and a bunch of pot and made ganja goo balls. I remember people coming up to me and saying, “I’m hallucinating. What the fuck is in those?” It was like something out of The Hangover—hot girls drooling all over themselves and people passed out on the chairs.

  Larry Page: All sorts of fun things.

  Charlie Ayers: Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later.

  Heather Cairns: You kind of trusted Larry with his personal life. We always kind of worried that Sergey was going to date somebody in the company…

  Charlie Ayers: Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.

  Heather Cairns: And we didn’t have locks, so you can’t help it if you walk in on people if there’s no lock. Remember, we’re a bunch of twenty-somethings except for me—ancient at thirty-five, so there’s some hormones and they’re raging.

  Charlie Ayers: HR told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.

  Heather Cairns: Oh my God: This is a sexual harassment claim waiting to happen! That was my concern.

  Charlie Ayers: When Cheryl Sandberg joined the company is when I saw a vast shift in everything in the company. People who came in wearing suits were actually being hired.

  Heather Cairns: When Eric Schmidt joined, I thought, Well, now, we have a chance. This guy is serious. This guy is real. This guy is high-profile. And of course he had to be an engineer, too. Otherwise, Larry and Sergey wouldn’t have it.

  Sergey Brin: Larry and I searched for over a year, and managed to alienate fifty of the top executives in Silicon Valley. Eric was experienced and the only one who went to Burning Man.

  Eric Schmidt: We had all been at Burning Man together.

  Sergey Brin: Which we thought was an important criterion. He’s a great cultural fit. We hang out together. We discuss and decide on stuff together. More companies should look at cultural fit.

  Charlie Ayers: A lot of people internally in the company were really happy to see him coming because he was now the official old guy. Before Schmidt, you’d look around the building for an adult, and you’re not seeing too many of them.

  Heather Cairns: One of his first days at work he did this sort of public address with the company and he said, “I want you to know who your real competition is.” He said, “It’s Microsoft.” And everyone went, What?

  Ray Sidney: In one of his gigs previous to Google, Eric was the CTO of SUN Microsystems, which was a high flyer until, essentially, Microsoft ate all their lunch. Because over the years regular PCs became so much more capable that it became very different for people to justify some crazy expensive workstation. It’s the same thing that happened to Silicon Graphics, right? SGI had these even higher-end systems, and then basically PCs caught up. So Eric had the experience to know.

  Heather Cairns: And Schmidt said, “Microsoft is a monopoly, and as long as we can stay under the radar, we have a chance. So we don’t even want them to look at us. We don’t want them to know about us.” We’re like, “But they’re not a
search engine!” He’s like, “It doesn’t matter. As soon as we get on their radar, they’re going to try to crush us.”

  Terry Winograd: I can remember some higher-level meetings I was in, which were about what Google could do that would stay under Microsoft’s radar. In fact, “Canada” was the code word for Microsoft, because it was big and up north, right? There was basically a sense that if Microsoft decided Google was a threat they could squash it, and they wanted to make sure they didn’t trigger that reaction.

  Ev Williams: There was quite a bit of angst and existential concern that the next version of Windows was going to have search built into the OS. And how were we going to compete with that?

  Heather Cairns: So, I remember thinking, Huh, wow. He thinks we’re a threat to Microsoft. Are you kidding me? So I think then that speech made me realize that maybe we had more gravity than I understood.

  Marissa Mayer: It was a bigger vision than we had really tangibly talked about before. That was a big moment for us.

  Free as in Beer

  Two teenagers crash the music industry

  In the late nineties dot-com hype and hysteria overtook Silicon Valley and the nation. If not for Monica Lewinsky, the web would have been all any journalist ever wrote about—and thus the old media drove legions to the new. Millions bought a modem, installed Netscape Navigator, and signed a contract with an internet service provider. Then they finally logged on for a firsthand look at cyberspace—and often logged off feeling a bit disappointed. One could buy something off eBay or from one of the other e-commerce sites that were popping up like mushrooms. One could Google various topics in an infinite library of ridiculously uneven quality. One could snicker over webzines like Suck. And that was about it. There was just not all that much fun to be had online—until Napster came along in 1999. Napster was a search engine—like Google—but one that was specifically optimized for finding music files. It opened up a Pandora’s box: all the world’s music, ripe for the picking. But was Napster a tool for stealing? Or sharing? The battle over the meaning of Stewart Brand’s maxim “Information wants to be free” heated up until it nearly became a shooting war. Napster pitted young versus old, the future versus the past, Silicon Valley versus the entire rest of the world.

  Shawn Fanning: It’s hard to explain where things were at back then.

  Jordan Ritter: This was a long time ago. MySpace was cool. Google hadn’t taken off. There was no Facebook. None of that stuff had happened yet.

  Shawn Fanning: I was eighteen. I hadn’t seen much of the world…

  Ali Aydar: I’d known Shawn Fanning since he was fifteen. For him I was kind of the older guy that he looked up to and asked advice… even though at the time, you know, I was twenty-three.

  Mark Pincus: Sean Parker came and worked for Freeloader in the summer of ’96 when he was fourteen. We were the only internet company in DC, and Freeloader was, for a minute, the first viral phenomenon on the internet. Then we got acquired just as we were moving to San Francisco. We felt like San Francisco was the Motor City of the internet, and if you were going to be on the internet you had to be there.

  Eileen Richardson: I was a partner of a venture firm based in Chicago, and I believed the internet was going to change the world. The other partners told me that this was just another wave of technology and it soon would be gone. And I said, “I disagree. Bye-bye. I’m going out to Silicon Valley.” That was ’98.

  Ali Aydar: It was the dot-com boom, and I’m in Chicago languishing away at a bank, and I have a degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. Why am I at a bank in Chicago? I need to be in Silicon Valley, I need to be in the dot-com boom, and be taking advantage of it in some way. So I came out to Silicon Valley in August of 1999.

  Jordan Ritter: I was a paid hacker. I lived in downtown Boston, which was the center of hacking in the United States at the time: It wasn’t New York, it wasn’t LA, it wasn’t even Silicon Valley. Boston was the seat of it, and I was in the middle of that.

  Sean Parker: Shawn Fanning and I met in the computer underground. We’re living in suburbia, interested in computer science, and hanging out with a lot of people online who shared our interest.

  Jordan Ritter: Fanning’s online handle was “Napster,” and Napster is in this hacker community called w00w00, and he was just like, “Hey, there’s a .exe, go check it out,” and a couple of us download it and use it, and there’s nobody on it, but it works for the ten of us that were on it.

  Shawn Fanning’s program immediately got noticed: The first people to jump on the Napster bandwagon were his friends Sean Parker and Jordan Ritter. Parker started working on a business plan, while Ritter rewrote much of the code in order to make sure it could scale. Sure enough, the users started coming—and immediately after that, the money. Silicon Valley investors were desperate to find the next Netscape, the next eBay, the next big score.

  Jordan Ritter: So I’m working on this stuff. As we started to work on it, we all got bit by the bug, and maybe it was May when it was starting to take off: Maybe there were a hundred users. I’m feeling good, right? I was young, and I’m half stoned. I did some of my best work stoned, it was great. Actually, most of Napster was written stoned. I’m just going to be honest about that. But I was writing code before there was a company, before there was equity, before there were salaries. So I am a technical cofounder. We didn’t have that language back then, because nobody gave a fuck about engineers back then. Parker and I barely ever interacted. Parker plainly was a groupie, he wanted to be part of this elite, underworld group of hackers. But he could never make the cut, which was hard for him, because we were the outcasts. We were the social outcasts. How the fuck do you get rejected by the outcasts?

  Mark Pincus: Sean Parker was a Unix programmer—or he said he was. What he had, and still has, was an amazing nose for what’s going to be the next viral thing.

  Shawn Fanning: Sean was trying to make it a business and legal while we kept it up and running and were scaling and treading water. It was one day at a time.

  Jordan Ritter: Then there was a day, I think it was June, where I got a message from Shawn that said something to the effect of, “Holy shit! John incorporated the company—and he dicked me out of the ownership!” And the blood drained out of my face. Shawn didn’t have a dad growing up; John was his uncle. He was absolutely the car salesman type. He could bully you into doing anything. And John, without telling Shawn, incorporated the company and gave himself 70 percent of it. And if there was one mistake, one fucking mistake that sank us, it was that one. Because when it came time to raise money, no one wanted to deal with John and his big-swinging-dick attitude, so we ended up settling for second best, or third best, or fourth best, fifth best, time and time again. That really set us up for failure from the very beginning.

  Mark Pincus: Sean e-mailed me the business plan for Napster and he said he was working with this other Shawn, Shawn Fanning. He said he had this music download service that was exploding, and every time they added more servers it would grow and they needed more money so they could buy more servers. And that’s usually a good sign that you want to invest: Everyone is eating the dog food, they just need more of it. So I gave them a hundred thousand dollars, and it was one of the first checks that they got.

  Shawn Fanning: We eventually took money from John Fanning’s friend Yosi Amram.

  Eileen Richardson: Yosi was a guy that I had known for years in Boston and who had moved to Silicon Valley not long before me. And that’s when this man, Yosi Amram, said, “Hey, check this out. I think that you’d be really interested.” And I went home and downloaded Napster. And I remember just going, “Oh my God, this is it! This is the missing key.” So Yosi put in a couple hundred thousand dollars and I put in a couple hundred thousand dollars so that we had some money.

  The money came with three conditions. One: that John Fanning get out of the way. Two: that the company move to Silicon Valley. And three: that the company get some professional management help—s
o-called adult supervision.

  Shawn Fanning: Sean Parker and I moved out to Northern California. We hired some people and it became a company.

  Ali Aydar: So I had been in Silicon Valley for maybe three weeks when I get a phone call from John Fanning, who said, “You’re not going to believe me, but Shawn has gotten some angel funding for his project and they made a move out to San Francisco and you should really, you should really meet them.” So we met in a restaurant in downtown Palo Alto. And Shawn had told me the concept to develop Napster about ten months earlier, when he was still in school, and at the time I had told him, “It’s not going to work, and the reason why it’s not going to work is, you’re going to have a hard time getting people to open up their hard drives. Because people are going to be concerned about viruses.” The thought that people are just going to open up their hard drives to some program that they downloaded off the internet was incredulous to me, and for Napster to really work, everyone would need to do that. So they’re describing it to me at this restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, and now I take some time to understand, because I fundamentally still had the same problem with it. So Shawn explained more about it technically. How he got some initial adoption by just putting a server up through his uncle’s cable modem and because it got so much traffic the first time he put it up how it crashed the cable modem. And both Sean and Shawn were really animated about why this is such a big deal: It’s not just us young people who are into music but our parents and our grandparents. Music touches everybody, and for everybody, young or old, there is some music that they like, and so that means the addressable market for this thing is every human being on the planet. And I slowly begin to see why this is going to be huge.

  Sean Parker: And, look, if you grew up online, you knew that in a matter of years everyone would be sharing MP3s.