Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Biz Stone: Google was a weird place—like a weird kid land. Adults worked there, but there were all these big, colorful, bouncy balls. Eric Schmidt had a twisty playground slide that he could exit his office from—which now seems almost perverted.

  Heather Cairns: I did the employee manual and I modeled our culture after Stanford—because that’s where most of our people were coming from.

  Sean Parker: Google really did set themselves up to get great engineers by trying to make their environment feel as similar to grad school as possible. Google could make the case: “Oh, don’t worry, this is going to feel a lot like when you were a researcher. This isn’t like selling out and going into the corporate world, you’re still an academic, you just work at Google now.” They ended up getting a lot of really smart people because of that.

  Ev Williams: And then we show up and we are these weirdos: bloggers from the city. So I always felt like an outsider, but I was still impressed by Google.

  Douglas Edwards: It was a difficult integration, because we had somewhat different cultures. So when there were issues of technical integration there was friction. The expectations of the engineers at Google were unreasonably high, perhaps, and Blogger was a little bit more laid-back.

  Mark Pincus: Evan Williams and the people at Blogger were these superhip sort of creative people that wanted to do this kind of fringy thing that was cool—and they were buried inside Google.

  Biz Stone: Google was not a normal place at all. There was just all kinds of weird stuff going on. I would just walk around and check stuff out like the kid in Willy Wonka going around the chocolate factory.

  Heather Cairns: Larry and Sergey would be doing crap with Legos, building stuff with Legos.

  Larry Page: Lego Mindstorms. They’re little Lego kits that have a computer built in. They’re like robots with sensors.

  Heather Cairns: I remember them making a rubber wheel and moving it over paper. I was like, “What are you doing?” “Well, we want to scan every book and publication and put it on the internet.” I’d say, “Are you crazy?” And they’d say, “The only thing that holds us back is turning pages. Right now it costs a lot of money to pay a human to do this with a scanner 24/7, so we are trying to find a way to walk the pages under this wheel to automate it.”

  Biz Stone: Like one day I walk into a room and there was just a whole bunch of people dazed out on these automated contraptions with lights and foot pedals and books. And I was like, “What are you guys doing?” They said, “We are scanning every book published in the world.” And I was like, “Okay. Carry on.”

  Heather Cairns: Part of me even wondered: Are they losing interest in the search engine? Sometimes it seemed like it but no, they just always had about seven things going at once—because that was their interest.

  Biz Stone: And then I distinctly remember going into what I thought was a closet, and there was this Indian dude on the ground with no shoes on and he had a screwdriver and he was taking apart all these DVRs. He looked like he had been up all night or something. And I said, “What are you working on in here?” And he said, “I’m recording all broadcast TV.” And I was like, “Okay. Carry on.”

  Marissa Mayer: I was there the day we did the first Street View experiments. It was a Saturday and we just wanted to blow off some steam. We rented an $8,000 camera from Wolf Camera that was considerably less when rented per day. We drove around in a little blue Volkswagen Bug with the camera on a tripod in the passenger seat. We just started driving around Palo Alto taking a photo every fifteen seconds, and then, at the end of the day, we took photo stitching software to see if we could stitch the pictures together.

  Heather Cairns: Larry and Sergey were first and foremost, and probably still are, inventors. That was their true love.

  Douglas Edwards: Sometimes it was hard to separate what was fantasy from what was a real proposal. From the very beginning Sergey and Larry—well, in particular, Larry—was talking about space tethers, and how that’s the business we should really be in. You never knew whether to take them seriously or not.

  Marissa Mayer: I hosted weekly brainstorming sessions because we wanted people to think big. One week I started the session with the space tether. We started brainstorming about building it out of carbon nanotubes, and could we use it to do pizza delivery to the moon?

  Douglas Edwards: Sergey would just throw out these marketing ideas. He wanted to project our logo on the Moon. He wanted to take the entire marketing budget and use it to help Chechen refugees. He wanted to make Google-branded condoms that we would give out to high schools. There were a lot of ideas that were floated and most of them never became full-fledged projects. But if Larry and Sergey suggested something you pretty much had to take it at face value for a while.

  Marissa Mayer: Some things we actually did go out and build—like driverless cars. We brainstormed that.

  Biz Stone: It was just strange, it was really weird, but it was awesome, too.

  Ev Williams: So I was not happy at Google, which today I totally blame myself for. It was eight hundred people when I got there. I considered it a big company, but it was not a big company. It had just grown really fast and everything was broken and immature and chaotic, and I let myself think that was wrong when, in fact, it was exactly as it should have been.

  Charlie Ayers: The whole climate of the company was a focus on growth, growth, growth.

  Ev Williams: Their perspective was that search and advertising were on fire, and we’re going to IPO next year—and there’s this Blogger thing, where people are posting their cat pictures.

  Heather Cairns: I would say that by 2003 it’s a very different place than when we started. We’re like two thousand people, and people were talking about going public.

  Ev Stone: We were making a lot of money, but before going public, no one knew how much money Google was making. But the management did, they were very excited about it.

  Heather Cairns: Going public. Being rich. Going public. Going public. That was really on the forefront of so many people’s minds.

  Charlie Ayers: At that point there were a lot of us who had been there forever, who pretty much would just come to hang out. They were waiting, not even working anymore. You were seeing that happen with a lot of people.

  Ray Sidney: I got burnt-out. I was not feeling very productive. I thought, You know what? I need to get away.

  Charlie Ayers: A lot of the early-timers were looking at, like, How much does this island cost? There was a lot of distraction.

  Ray Sidney: Originally I thought, You know what? I just need to take a month or two off, and then I’ll kind of get that fire back in my belly. And that never happened. I left in March of 2003.

  Charlie Ayers: So it was smart to have a whole new wave coming in, because they were the ones that were focusing on making the business happen.

  Biz Stone: I got there in 2003, worked there for a year, and in 2004 they go public. It was perfect timing.

  Charlie Ayers: As the IPO got closer, the level of distraction got greater and greater and greater. Their eyelids were too heavy with dollar signs.

  John Battelle: With the benefit of hindsight, Google’s IPO in 2004 was as important as the Netscape IPO in 1995. Everyone got excited about the internet in the late nineties, but the truth was a very small percentage of the world used it. Google went public after the dot-com crash and reestablished the web as a medium. Web 1.0 was a low-bandwidth, underdeveloped toy. Web 2.0 is a robust broadband medium with three billion people using it for everything from conducting business to communicating with your friends and family.

  Biz Stone: I just got there in just the right time to get a feel for the before and the after.

  Douglas Edwards: After the IPO it became more buttoned up, more metrics driven—which was good for the company, probably. But it was not the culture that I was used to and had enjoyed when I was there.

  Charlie Ayers: They’re like, “we’re publicly traded now.” So 2004 was not the best year a
t Google, morale-wise. They started sending more of us to Dale Carnegie classes.

  Heather Cairns: Larry and Sergey used to hold their forks and knives in a fist, scooping. They used to scoop food into their mouths, which would be a couple of inches from the plate and I’d be like, I can’t even watch this. I can’t. I’m going to be sick. They had to be taught not to do that.

  Charlie Ayers: There were a handful of us that would go to public speaking classes, media training classes, leadership classes.

  Heather Cairns: Nobody has superbad, disgusting behavior anymore. It’s really depressing. The personality has been coached out of them—all of them.

  I’m CEO… Bitch

  Zuck moves to Silicon Valley to “dominate” (and does)

  In Silicon Valley during the mid-aughts, the conventional wisdom was that the internet gold rush was largely over. The land had been grabbed. The frontier had been settled. The web had been won. Yet nobody ever bothered to send the memo to Mark Zuckerberg—because at the time, Zuck was a nobody: an ambitious teenaged college student obsessed with the computer underground. He knew his way around computers, but other than that, he was pretty clueless—someone had to explain to him that internet sites like Napster were actually businesses, built by corporations. Zuckerberg could hack, however, and he knew exactly what he wanted to build: TheFacebook.com—a college-specific version of Friendster, a pioneering social network based in Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg’s knockoff site was a hit on his Harvard campus, and in 2004 he decided to spend a summer in the Valley rolling it out to other colleges nationwide. The whole enterprise began as something of a lark. Indeed, Zuckerberg’s first business cards read, “I’m CEO… bitch.” The brogrammer ’tude was a joke… or was it?

  Sean Parker: The dot-com era sort of ended with Napster, then there’s the dot-com bust, which leads to the social media era.

  Steven Johnson: At the time, the web was fundamentally a literary metaphor: “pages”—and then these hypertext links between pages. There was no concept of the user; that was not part of the metaphor at all.

  Mark Pincus: I mark Napster as the beginning of the social web—people, not pages. For me that was the breakthrough moment, because I saw that the internet could be this completely distributed peer-to-peer network. We could disintermediate those big media companies and all be connected to each other.

  Steven Johnson: To me it really started with blogging in the early 2000s. You started to have these sites that were oriented around a single person’s point of view. It suddenly became possible to imagine, Oh, maybe there’s another element here that the web could also be organized around? Like I trust these five people, I’d like to see what they are suggesting. And that’s kind of what early blogging was like.

  Ev Williams: Blogs then were link heavy and mostly about the internet. “We’re on the internet writing about the internet, and then linking to more of the internet, and isn’t that fun?”

  Steven Johnson: You would pull together a bunch of different voices that would basically recommend links to you, and so there was a personal filter.

  Mark Pincus: In 2002 Reid Hoffman and I started brainstorming: What if the web could be like a great cocktail party? Where you can walk away with these amazing leads, right? And what’s a good lead? A good lead is a job, an interview, a date, an apartment, a house, a couch… And so Reid and I started saying, “Wow, this people web could actually generate something more valuable than Google, because you’re in this very, very highly vetted community that has some affinity to each other, and everyone is there for a reason, so you have trust.” The signal-to-noise ratio could be be very high. We called it Web 2.0, but nobody wanted to hear about it, because this was in the nuclear winter of the consumer internet.

  Sean Parker: So during the period between 2000 and 2004, kind of leading up to Facebook, there is this feeling that everything that there was to be done with the internet has already been done. The absolute bottom is probably around 2002. PayPal goes public in 2002, and it’s the only consumer internet IPO. So there’s this weird interim period where there’s a total of only six companies funded or something like that. Plaxo was one of them. Plaxo was a proto–social network. It’s this in-between thing: some kind of weird fish with legs.

  Aaron Sittig: Plaxo is the missing link. Plaxo was the first viral growth company to really succeed intentionally. This is when we really started to understand viral growth.

  Sean Parker: The most important thing I ever worked on was developing algorithms for optimizing virality at Plaxo.

  Aaron Sittig: Viral growth is when people using the product spreads the product to other people—that’s it. It’s not people deciding to spread the product because they like it. It’s just people in the natural course of using the software to do what they want to do, naturally spreading it to other people.

  Sean Parker: There was an evolution that took place from the sort of earliest proto–social network, which is probably Napster, to Plaxo, which only sort of resembled a social network but had many of the characteristics of one, then to LinkedIn, MySpace, and Friendster, then to this modern network which is Facebook.

  Ezra Callahan: In the early 2000s, Friendster gets all the early adopters, has a really dense network, has a lot of activity, and then just hits this breaking point.

  Aaron Sittig: There was this big race going on and Friendster had really taken off, and it really seemed like Friendster had invented this new thing called “social networking,” and they were the winner, the clear winner. And it’s not entirely clear what happened, but the site just started getting slower and slower and at some point it just stopped working.

  Ezra Callahan: And that opens the door for MySpace.

  Ev Williams: MySpace was a big deal at the time.

  Sean Parker: It was a complicated time. MySpace had very quickly taken over the world from Friendster. They’d seized the mantle. So Friendster was declining, MySpace was ascending.

  Scott Marlette: MySpace was really popular, but then MySpace had scaling trouble, too.

  Aaron Sittig: Then pretty much unheralded and not talked about much, Facebook launched in February of 2004.

  Dustin Moskovitz: Back then there was a really common problem that now seems trivial. It was basically impossible to think of a person by name and go and look up their picture. All of the dorms at Harvard had individual directories called “face-books”—some were printed, some were online, and most were only available to the students of that particular dorm. So we decided to create a unified version online and we dubbed it “The Facebook” to differentiate it from the individual ones.

  Mark Zuckerberg: And within a couple weeks, a few thousand people had signed up. And we started getting e-mails from people at other colleges asking for us to launch it at their schools.

  Ezra Callahan: Facebook launched at the Ivy Leagues originally, and it wasn’t because they were snooty, stuck-up kids who only wanted to give things to the Ivy Leagues. It was because they had this intuition that people who go to the Ivy Leagues are more likely to be friends with kids at other Ivy League schools.

  Aaron Sittig: When Facebook launched at Berkeley, the rules of socializing just totally transformed. When I started at Berkeley, the way you found out about parties was you spent all week talking to people figuring out what was interesting, and then you’d have to constantly be in contact. With Facebook there, knowing what was going on on the weekend was trivial. It was just all laid out for you.

  Facebook came to the Stanford campus—in the heart of Silicon Valley—quite early: March 2004.

  Sean Parker: My roommates in Portola Valley were all going to Stanford.

  Ezra Callahan: So I was a year out of Stanford, I graduated Stanford in 2003, and me and four of my college friends rented a house for that year just near the campus, and we had an extra bedroom available, and so we advertised around on a few Stanford e-mail lists to find a roommate to move into that house with us. We got a reply from this guy named “Sean Parker.” He ende
d up moving in with us pretty randomly, and we discovered that while Napster had been a cultural phenomenon, it didn’t make him any money.

  Sean Parker: And so the girlfriend of one of my roommates was using a product, and I was like, “You know, that looks a lot like Friendster or MySpace.” She’s like, “Oh yes, well, nobody in college uses MySpace.” There was something a little rough about MySpace.

  Mark Zuckerberg: So MySpace had almost a third of their staff monitoring the pictures that got uploaded for pornography. We hardly ever have any pornography uploaded. The reason is that people use their real names on Facebook.

  Adam D’Angelo: Real names are really important.

  Aaron Sittig: We got this clear early on because of something that was established as a community principle at The Well: You own your own words. And we took it farther than The Well. We always had everything be traceable back to a specific real person.

  Stewart Brand: The Well could have gone that route, but we did not. That was one of the mistakes we made.

  Mark Zuckerberg: And I think that that’s a really simple social solution to a possibly complex technical issue.

  Ezra Callahan: In this early period, it’s a fairly hacked-together simple website: just basic web forms, because that’s what Facebook profiles are.

  Ruchi Sanghvi: There was a little profile pic, and it said things like, “This is my profile” and “See my friends,” and there were three or four links and one or two other boxes below that.

  Aaron Sittig: But I was really impressed by how focused and clear their product was. Small details—like when you went to your profile, it really clearly said, “This is you,” because social networking at the time was really, really hard to understand. So there was a maturity in the product that you don’t typically see until a product has been out there for a couple of years and been refined.