In The Plex

by Steve Levy

  Still, anyone visiting the Google campus during the election year could not miss a fervid groundswell of Obama-love. While some commentators wrung hands over the Spock-like nature of the senator’s personality, Googlers swooned over the dispassionate, reason-based approach he took to problem solving. Google employees, through the company PAC, contributed more than $800,000 to his campaign, trailing only Goldman Sachs and Microsoft in total contributions.

  “It’s a selection bias,” says Eric Schmidt of the unofficial choice of most of his employees. “The people here all have been selected very carefully, so obviously there’s going to be some prejudice in favor of a set of characteristics—highly educated, analytic, thoughtful, communicates well.”

  Sitting among the Googlers packed in Charlie’s Café on November 14 was one of the company’s brightest young product managers, Dan Siroker. (As an indication of his pedigree, he was a Palo Alto native whose mother was the computer science department secretary at Stanford and had known Larry and Sergey as graduate students.) Tall and blond, with a cutting wit and an easy social demeanor, Siroker had begun his time at Google working on ad products. In 2007, he had moved to one of Google’s glamour projects, the Chrome browser. He loved the job. But the Obama appearance galvanized him. “He had me at ‘bubble sort,’” he later joked.

  What really entranced him was Obama’s idea that government should be like Google. Everyone at Google believed they were changing the world, he thought, but could you imagine all of the United States acting that way? He emailed his résumé to the campaign and in early December got a phone call telling him that the campaign could use bodies, particularly those connected to brains that understood the Internet. Siroker got permission to take a few weeks off. “If I told them [Google] I was going to work for some Republican, I think things would have been different,” he says.

  At campaign headquarters in Chicago, Siroker began looking at the web efforts to recruit volunteers and solicit donations. His experience at Google gave him a huge advantage. “I’d worked on Google ads, a huge system, which probably only three people in the world—even at Google—truly, fully understand,” he says. “It’s the mentality of taking data and trying to figure out how to optimize something.” The Obama web operation was run by smart people who’d picked up tech skills along the way but were not hard-core engineers. “I was probably the only computer science degree in the whole campaign,” he says.

  As exciting as the campaign was, he returned to Google to help launch Chrome. But over the July 4 weekend, he went back to Chicago to visit the friends he’d met on the campaign. Barack Obama walked through headquarters, and Siroker was introduced to him. He told the senator he was visiting from Google. Obama smiled. “I’ve been saying around here that we need a little bit more Google integration.” That exchange with the candidate was enough to change Siroker’s course once more. Back in Mountain View, he told his bosses he was leaving for good.

  He became the chief analytics officer of the Obama campaign. He saw his mission as applying Google principles to the campaign. Just as Google ran endless experiments to find happy users, Siroker and his team used Google’s Website Optimizer to run experiments to find happy contributors. The conventional wisdom had been to cadge donations by artful or emotional pitches, to engage people’s idealism or politics. Siroker ran a lot of A/B tests and found that by far the success came when you offered some swag; a T-shirt or a coffee mug.

  Some of his more surprising tests came in figuring out what to put on the splash page, the one that greeted visitors when they went to Obama2008.com. Of four alternatives tested, the picture of Obama’s family drew the most clicks. Even the text on the buttons where people could click to get to the next page was subject to test. Should they say, sign up, learn more, join us now, or sign up now? (Answer: learn more, by a significant margin.)

  Siroker refined things further by sending messages to people who had already donated. If they’d never signed up before, he’d offer them swag to donate. If they had gone through the process, there was no need for swag—it was more effective to have a button that said please donate.

  Using Google’s Website Optimizer tool, Siroker and his team tested the cost per click of visitors and kept tweaking and testing to lower the cost. There were a lot of reasons why Barack Obama raised $500 million online to McCain’s $210 million, but analytics undoubtedly played a part.

  Someone posted a picture of Siroker on his Facebook wall on election night. Everyone else at campaign headquarters was cheering or crying with joy. Siroker was sitting at his computer with his back to the TV, making sure that the new splash page that would welcome website visitors was the one celebrating the victory, not the one they’d prepared saying he’d lost. After that, he was going to push the start button on yet another test, to see which one of four victory T-shirts would be the most effective in garnering donations for the Democratic National Committee. Just as Google ad campaigns never ended, neither did online political campaigns.

  During the transition, Siroker continued working on analytics as deputy media director. But as soon as he relocated to Washington, he felt something different. The desire to innovate for change seemed to have been sapped. In part, it reflected the shift from a campaign into a much bigger, established operation. Google had experienced a similar transformation but had consciously made adjustments in an attempt to preserve its freshness. Even though the company was huge, employees could feel that their individual group was kind of a start-up. (That’s the way it had felt to Siroker with Chrome.) But being on the transition team felt like working for the biggest, most paranoid company in the world. And this was before the Democrats controlled the government.

  Also, Siroker had to wear a suit every day. “The director of our department wanted to make it very clear that we were serious,” he says. But he hated it.

  When the White House offered Siroker the newly imagined post of director of citizen participation, he did what any Googler would do: laid out the problem like a math quest. He wanted desperately to be part of a transformative movement in government, but his experience during the transition had sent a clear signal that in working in the White House, he wouldn’t be making a difference. “I didn’t feel I was using my full potential to make an impact.” Also, Siroker told the White House, he’d have to use Microsoft Exchange instead of Gmail. “It was absolutely killing me.” Ultimately, the negatives won. He did not return to Google but cofounded a start-up to help teach kids arithmetic.

  Siroker suggested that the incoming White House hire Katie Stanton, who’d headed the Google Elections Team, for the job he’d been offered. Stanton would have to make sacrifices: the White House job paid $82,500; her Google salary had been “a multiple of that,” she says. She also had to sell all her stock options. It seemed a small price to participate in an adventure where Google’s values would spread throughout the U.S. government.

  Stanton was one of a handful of key Googlers who joined the administration. The most prominent was Andrew McLaughlin, who left his post as Google’s policy director to become the deputy to the chief technical officer of the United States. Sonal Shah, who had worked on global initiatives for the Google.org foundation, became the director of the newly established Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, overseeing a $50 million budget. Meanwhile, Eric Schmidt sat on Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and was one of the president’s go-to CEOs when captains of industry were required as a photo backdrop.

  They joined a team of techie Obamanauts who saw their job as bringing the digital tools of empowerment to Washington. They included not only people who had toiled in cyberspace’s election districts but administrators such as Vivek Kundra, the imaginative chief technology officer of Washington, D.C., who became the chief information officer of the national government. McLaughlin’s boss, the first national chief technology officer, was Aneesh Chopra, formerly Virginia’s secretary of technology. Perhaps the most powerful was the new FCC chairma
n, Julius Genachowski, a former Internet executive (with IAC, Barry Diller’s operation) who was a Harvard Law School cohort and basketball buddy of the incoming president. While emphasizing that Google was not entitled to special government treatment, Genachowski acknowledged that its values resonated with the new administration: “I think of them as Internet values,” he says. “They’re values of openness, they’re values of participation, they’re values of speed and efficiency. Bringing those tools and techniques into government is vital.”

  But when the outsiders like Stanton hit the nation’s capital, they went straight into a buzz saw of illogic, bad intentions, mistrust, and, worst of all, obsolete gadgets. Not only were they chained to outdated Windows computers, but they were denied the Internet tools they had come to rely on as much as breathing. Rules dictated that there could be no Facebook, no Google Talk, no Gmail, no Twitter, no Skype. (Even the president had to fight to retain his BlackBerry, and the one he wound up with was slowed down by security add-ons and cordoned off to all but a few designated texters.) “I’d been going a million miles an hour at Google,” she says. “And suddenly there were all these rules. Where you can put content. The Presidential Records Act. Terms of service agreements.” Even using the tools that were available in a modern, effective manner was often frowned upon. Not long after she took the job, Stanton did a reply-all email, which was common at Google. At the White House, someone took her aside and reprimanded her.

  From his own perch as deputy to CTO Aneesh Chopra, Andrew McLaughlin was flummoxed by the same rules. By that time McLaughlin had taken to carrying his personal laptop into his office with a wireless modem so he could maintain the flow of information on Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail he felt was necessary. He took pains to keep his official work on the government computers. Eventually he got permission to use Facebook, Linked-in, and Twitter on his White House computer. (But not Skype.) Still, he welcomed the opportunity to help bring the government into the digital age. “The good part of it is that no one knows what we’re supposed to do,” says McLaughlin of the CTO office’s mission. “They only know that we’re bringing magical Internet pixie dust—we’re supposed to sprinkle that over things and make them better, though they’re not really sure how.”

  Katie Stanton parsed her job the same way Google divided its overall corporate energies, breaking it up 70, 20, 10. The bulk of her work, 70 percent, was amplifying the president’s message. The 20 percent part was gathering input from various online constituencies (the “mommy bloggers,” the financial consumers, and so on) and interacting with them. Finally, the smallest part was helping citizens interact with one another. Stanton thought that was the most important part of her work, but its lower priority made it the hardest to get done.

  The job was frustrating. Google hadn’t been perfect, but people got things done—because they were engineers. One of the big ideas of Google was that if you gave engineers the freedom to dream big and the power to do it—if you built the whole operation around their mind-set and made it clear that they were in charge—the impossible could be accomplished. But in the government, even though Stanton’s job was to build new technologies and programs, “I didn’t meet one engineer,” she says. “Not one software engineer who works for the United States government. I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t met any. At Google I worked with people far smarter and creative than me, and they were engineers, and they always made everyone else look good. They’re doers. We get stuck in the government because we really don’t have a lot of those people.”

  Though Stanton generally tried to steer clear of Google connections to avoid the appearance of a conflict, she did work on one project that used Google technology to allow citizens to ask the president questions via the Internet. The software was a version of Dory, the program used at Google to handle questions for Page and Brin during TGIF sessions. It had originally been conceived as a 20 percent project by an engineer named Taliver Heath, who named it after the fish in Finding Nemo that always asked questions. Dory provided a clever, algorithmic means of allowing large numbers of people to rank lists of questions. You gave thumbs-up for your favorite questions and thumbs-down for the ones you liked least. A positive vote would count twice as much as a negative one.

  By the time Obama agreed to accept questions from an online audience, Google was marketing Dory outside the company. To avoid intellectual property conflicts with Disney, it had renamed the product Moderator. People in the administration were excited that using this data-backed, algorithmic system, they could collect a range of questions that reflected what citizens wanted to know. On March 26, 2009, President Obama stood in the East Room of the White House before a crowd of a hundred onlookers and was presented with the top-ranked questions. More than 90,000 people had submitted questions, and Moderator processed over 3.6 million up-and-down votes to determine which ones rose to the top. The most popular ones were shown on a large flat-screen display. The top-ranked question was about whether legalizing marijuana would jump-start the economy. The second-ranked question involved … the legalization of marijuana. And the third question? Legalizing dope.

  The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) had encouraged people to vote up questions concerning that single issue. Some might have considered it cheating, but Google’s Moderator team saw it as a reflection of a passion in the population. The fact that people were motivated to organize on that issue was itself a data point.

  “I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” said the president before stating that legalizing weed was not a good strategy to grow the economy. Then he answered the lower-ranked questions about health care, college costs, home foreclosures, and high-speed rail.

  The other highlight of Stanton’s tenure at the White House was helping organize a presidential town meeting in Shanghai. Arguing over the tiniest point with Chinese officials bent on total control, Stanton got a taste of what Google’s Beijing government relations people dealt with all the time. The president, wary that the Chinese students would be too intimidated to ask a controversial question, wanted to add a question from the Internet. People submitted two thousand questions to the Department of State website. Each was given a number, and then a reporter was asked to pick two numbers between 1 and 2,000. The two questions that matched were presented to the U.S. ambassador to China, who chose one. It just happened to be on the topic that many were waiting for Obama to address: Internet freedom. Obama said he was in favor of it, though he did not argue the point so strongly that he offended his hosts.

  At a conference in January 2010, Stanton expressed her feelings about the difference between the White House and Google. “Working in government,” she said, “is like running a marathon. Blindfolded. Wearing sandbags.” Whereas Google was collegial, working for the White House was like a season of the reality show Survivor, whose motto was “Outwit, outplay, outlast.” She felt that she could make more of an impact joining the digital cadre of the Department of State, and in January 2010 she went to Foggy Bottom.

  Of all places, the State Department was one of the most active digital outposts in the administration. Inspired by a group of young, tech-savvy officials, it was promulgating an idea it called “21st Century Statecraft.” At State, Stanton felt she finally had a platform to use her Google skills in government. At a meeting one day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dropped by and welcomed her. Stanton’s computer was open, and the secretary asked what she was doing. “These are my OKRs,” she said and proceeded to explain how Google had taken Andy Grove’s “Objectives and Key Results” employee rating scheme to dizzying extremes. “That’s great—how could we do more of this here?” asked the secretary, and Stanton was thrilled. Could the State Department institute OKRs?

  Soon after, Stanton was attending her daughter’s basketball practice when her BlackBerry lit up. A huge earthquake had devastated Haiti. The previous week Stanton had been to a dinner where Secretary Clinton had broken bread with technology leader
s (including Eric Schmidt), and Stanton had met the CEO of a telecom company called Mobile Accord. She still had his cell number, and, while driving home, she talked to him about setting up a “short code” for cell callers that would enable people to quickly make an automatic donation to an aid fund for Haiti. When the code was sent by Short Message Service, the caller would donate five dollars to a fund. Or should it be ten dollars? Stanton and her contact wondered. They decided to go for ten. Stanton pinged her bosses, and to her delight the State Department approved the idea. Yes! That was why she had joined the government. “It’s solving a hard problem, it’s using technology, it’s inclusive,” she later said. When White House officials heard about it, their instinct was to slam on the brakes, to analyze all the ramifications before doing anything, even while people died on the streets. But State got the code out to the public. Before a week passed, contributors donated over $32 million. Millions more would come.

  Andrew McLaughlin was also onto the Haiti situation as soon as the temblors hit. From his pre-Google work at ICANN, the Internet governance organization, he knew people who ran Haiti Internet service providers. The only way he could get hold of them was through the Internet—the phones were dead, and the cell towers weren’t working. Skype was the obvious way to do it, but it was blocked on White House computers. Fortunately, McLaughlin had his MacBook and a wireless modem. Sitting in his office in the Executive Office Building, he kept a Skype line open to people on Boutilier Hill, a high point above Port-au-Prince where the Internet microwave lines terminate and the ISPs beam WiMax toward their customers in the city. There were five ISPs, and all were initially running—the Internet was thus the default communication system on the island. The people in charge promised to stay and keep the boxes running if they knew their families were all right. McLaughlin became their point person to keep things functioning, using various social networks and Internet tools to check on their families, arrange for transportation, and get kerosene shipped up the hill to keep the generators running. “If I wasn’t there with my own laptop and my own AirCard, none of this would have happened,” he says.