I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

by Douglas Edwards

  So the last thing I wanted to hear, five days before the launch of Gmail, was that we were going to make it a joke after all. It wouldn't be the April Fools' joke—we would go with my idea about a Google lunar office for that—but the executive staff had decreed we would do a hybrid announcement of sorts.

  There would be a press release that was factual, but with enough humorous elements to leave people wondering if Gmail was for real. We would brief a few journalists in advance, but only on condition that they agreed to write funny stories about the launch. And we would incorporate the slogan Larry had come up with: "Gmail. It feels good."

  Cindy was in Germany and largely offline, leaving PR Director David Krane to roll with the punches. "I knew we were going to be playing with people and challenging relationships if we shipped a communications vehicle written in such a way," he recalls. "Sergey insisted on it. I felt like we should hedge a little bit and deploy a few proven strategies in case things went haywire because our humor was misunderstood."

  David recommended letting a few trusted journalists and analysts in on the joke, so the day of the announcement we could refer people to them with questions about Gmail's potential impact on the industry. "No way!" he remembers Sergey telling him. "It's a joke. We want to surprise everybody. No way. Absolutely no way. Categorically, no."

  Meanwhile, Dennis Hwang spent the day before the launch coming up with ideas for a logo and trying to make it work in conjunction with the clown-colored Google brand. I suggested he make Google gray and let the Gmail logo carry the corporate colors. Even after four years at Google, I found it astounding that one twenty-something guy was sitting alone at his desk, sipping tea and developing the main branding element for a product to be used by millions of people—the night before it was scheduled to launch.

  That's when Sergey stopped by to ask if we were making a mistake launching Gmail as a joke. I had assured him many times before that it was, but now, after running so hard to make it happen, I began to have doubts. "No," I said. "It's not a mistake. It's funny, but I think it's a missed opportunity. If people think it's a joke, they might not take it seriously when we tell them it's real." That didn't persuade him, as I knew it wouldn't. We chatted a few minutes more, then he wandered off.

  Other cracks appeared as the pressure built in the final hours. There were miscommunications and dropped balls. Issues with version control on documents. Frantic revisions. Some bad assumptions. I apologized to our growing team of writers for being cranky and assured them they were doing great work. More worrisome, several engineers argued that the service itself wasn't ready. Paul pleaded for more servers to add capacity.

  "We launched it with a couple hundred machines," he told me later. "We launched it with almost no hardware. We were able to support Googlers and a handful of other people. That thing we launched just barely existed."

  At four p.m. on March 31, the press release went out. The Rubicon had been crossed.

  The phones in the PR department started ringing almost instantly. Once reporters got beyond annoyance at the ambiguity of our announcement, they were impressed. Their stories the next day were positive. We had dodged a bullet. Cindy was thrilled with the new breezy tone and style of our press communications, though she thought it unfortunate that we had rolled it out on April Fools'.

  On the first day, a quarter of a million users put their names on the waiting list for Gmail accounts.

  Then things started to go sideways.

  Reporters complained to Cindy that we had mishandled the announcement. A journalist friend of hers had assured people it was a joke and been embarrassed to be proven wrong. Even more than most people, reporters don't like to be proven wrong. Cindy was taking considerable flak, but that was hardly the worst of it.

  The ads in Gmail, targeted to the content of messages in the inbox, freaked people out. They didn't like it that Gmail was going to read their mail to serve them targeted ads. They called it "creepy" and an invasion of their privacy. Stories started showing up on TV and the Internet about Google's scary new email system. Conan O'Brien joked about it in his monologue. Why was Google even getting into email in the first place? Google was a search engine. Those who had urged the government to punish the advertising company DoubleClick for tracking users' online behavior put Gmail in the same camp.* Only worse. We were reading people's email.

  On April 12, California State Senator Liz Figueroa announced she would introduce legislation outlawing Gmail. She did not have a Gmail account. She had never seen a Gmail account. Almost no one had. In a press release, she quoted from a letter she had sent to Google: "I cannot urge you strongly enough to abandon this misbegotten idea. I believe you are embarking on a disaster of enormous proportions."

  When Sergey called the senator to explain that Gmail ads were placed automatically by computers, the same way emails were scanned for viruses, she didn't want to hear the details. She did not, in fact, like email, she informed him, and she certainly didn't want hers scanned by Google.

  I had never heard of Liz Figueroa, but I looked her up online and saw that she soon would be forced out of office by term limits. I wondered if she hoped attaching her name to a "pro-consumer" issue would help her win her next election.*

  A law against Gmail would certainly be a problem, but it wouldn't matter if we continued to be hammered by privacy groups and the press. No one would sign up for the service anyway.

  The day after Figueroa's announcement, I headed to Washington, DC. The trip had nothing to do with Gmail. My mother's sister had passed away and I was going to her funeral. It was an emotional experience for me during an already stressful time. As I stood graveside, all the pressure that had been building within me found an acceptable release. I found myself crying uncontrollably when I dropped a handful of dirt onto my aunt's coffin as it was lowered into the ground. I hugged my mother and sister for what seemed like a very long time. With all that had been happening, I had not had a chance to breathe, let alone process the events bombarding me. I knew the avalanche of new problems back home was accelerating in my absence.

  When I returned to the office, the atmosphere had changed. I sensed gloom and recrimination and frustration about the negative response to ads in Gmail. Sergey paced the office like a tiger in a tiny cage, commanding us to set up a war room to deal with the problem, demanding we put up more information on the site, and insisting that we tell everyone, "There is no privacy issue."

  It was a perspective shared by Paul and other engineers as well. Computers did the scanning, and computers were good at keeping secrets. It was a closed system. If there was no loss of privacy, there was no privacy issue. Why couldn't people understand that?

  "Just tell them spam filters and virus detectors have done this for years," Sergey instructed David Krane, who told me the founders dismissed critics as misinformed and intimated that they should "trust us, we have no record of doing anything bad." Sergey in particular seemed to take the criticism personally, and his frustration deepened with each passing day as Georges and Ana worked on a statement defending Gmail to post on the site. They had begun work on it while I was in DC, and when I rewrote it to make it more user-friendly, Sergey insisted we change it back. Though the writing was an improvement, he said, our users were not the target. He wanted a direct response to the points raised by privacy advocates, and he didn't care if users read it or not. In this time of crisis, Google would once again be a platform for expressing his personal perspective.

  Cindy's mood also darkened by the hour. She was stung by the criticism from her professional colleagues and unhappy with the response of our group to the conflagration we had ignited. Googlers from other departments were asking why we were not responding to all the misinformation circulating. What was our PR strategy?

  David and his group pushed Gmail accounts into the hands of journalists and analysts so they could see the service for themselves. Once they tried it, most backed off their alarmist tone about privacy, but that took time, and we were
now on the wrong side of public opinion. Cindy demanded to know how soon we could launch a corporate blog to respond more quickly to controversy—a project I had been working on for weeks.*

  Cindy seemed on edge, though not more so than anyone else, and not just with me. Sergey got singed when he repeated a rumor suggesting that PR had missed an opportunity to defend Gmail.

  I began dreading Cindy's late-night emails asking for updates on all the projects she thought I should be leading more forcefully. I had set up my inbox to color her messages bright red so I'd be sure not to miss them in the sea of spam. Now I switched the color to a subdued maroon and began taking deep breaths before opening each note. Still, I was unprepared for the missive she fired at me at three in the morning one Saturday, telling me a full plate was no excuse for letting the product-management team assume ownership of the Gmail privacy issue. User communication was my job, and once we lost control of it we would never get it back. There was more, and none of it was pleasant to read. I felt as if I had moved back to square one—with a difference.

  One of the tasks keeping me too busy to lead every charge was rewriting the language of our S-1 filing document. Google was finally ready to go public, and I knew that would change everything.

  PART IV

  CAN THIS REALLY BE THE END?

  As Google blossoms,

  We grow together, then part.

  I'm feeling lucky.

  Chapter 26

  S-1 for the Money

  WHY, 'TECHNOLOGY' AND not, 'technologies'?" asked the lawyer sitting ten bankers down from me.

  "We always refer to technology in the singular," I replied leaning forward so I could see him. "As a collective noun." I had no idea if that made any sense. I prayed there weren't any other English majors among the thirty attorneys, bankers, and venture capitalists in the room, all of whom were looking down at their own copies of our S-1 filing statement and following word by word with mechanical pencils and highlighters. If there were, they didn't speak up. We moved on to the next line of the text.

  The printing firm RR Donnelley had been putting ink on paper for almost as long as the Mercury News. Their facility in Palo Alto, however, bore little resemblance to my former place of employment. The conference room we met in was packed with the latest communication electronics and decorated in muted contemporary tones. A fully stocked kitchen was just down the hall, as were an entertainment lounge, a pool table, a gym, showers, and rollaway beds. A massage therapist was on duty in case the stress of editing became overwhelming. Located directly behind Silicon Valley's premier law firm, RR Donnelley was the place companies went when they were ready to go public.

  I had arrived late on Tuesday afternoon, April 27, and parked down the street from the Mission-style building as instructed. The license plate frame on my Taurus sported Google's logo and the words "I'm Feeling Lucky." If seen near Donnelley's, that could be enough to give away the secret we wanted to keep; that Project Denny's—our public filing-was under way.*

  I had not expected to be involved, but late the night before, Cindy had emailed me a draft of a letter Larry had written to Google's future stockholders. In it, he laid out the principles by which he, Sergey, and Eric intended to run Google after it went public. The sentiments were true, but the sentences stacked together like computer commands. Cindy asked if I wanted to take a pass at putting it in "Google voice." I made some quick edits and sent it back to see if I was on the right track. At eleven-thirty p.m., Larry sent me an instant message asking me to keep going. He was in his office with Salar, Susan, and Marissa hashing out the text. I kept going. At around one-thirty a.m., I sent my finished draft and went to bed.

  Larry's revised draft was waiting for me the next morning. Not much had changed. The style was still all Larry's. Cindy let me know that, at the board's urging, he had also asked Kara Swisher, the lead reporter covering Internet companies for the Wall Street Journal, to take a stab at improving it. Larry regarded Kara as family because she was married to Megan Smith, a Google manager, but Cindy upbraided him for contacting a journalist without her knowledge—especially one who wrote frequently about Google for the national media. Kara found Larry's request endearingly naive, but declined because of ethical considerations. Undeterred, Larry turned to James Fallows of the Atlantic. Larry always believed in hiring the best talent, and while Fallows did not accept payment, he offered a few editorial suggestions to make the language flow as if it had been written by a native speaker of English.

  Meanwhile, I had moved on to the business section of the document, a sixteen-page description of every product Google offered, our partners, our technology, and our corporate culture. I had a lot of changes there as well. Larry seemed more willing to incorporate input on that aspect of the filing, and I was invited to join the group finalizing the document at the printer's.

  When I arrived, I sat quietly. The room was intimidating and filled with suits worn by men of importance. Jonathan Rosenberg was in the chair to my left. He greeted me warmly and introduced me as "the voice of Google." "If Doug says it's not Googley, we need to change it," he informed the group.

  Everyone opened their books to the business section and someone began to read aloud. "'Google is a global leader in web search,'" he intoned, "'a web advertising innovator, a top Internet destination, and one of the most recognized brands in the world.'"

  "I rewrote that," I said, clearing my throat. "It should say, 'Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the ways people connect with information.'"

  "Why?" piped up a guy in an ironed polo shirt. "What's wrong with what we have?"

  "Google's mission is not limited to search," I told him. "Just last week we launched an email service. We're more than a search engine."

  And so it went for hours. At one point I tried calculating how much it would cost to hire everyone in the room for just one minute, assuming five hundred dollars an hour was probably the least any of those around the table charged for their time. By that estimate, my talk was not cheap, but Jonathan prodded me to speak up each time he sensed I was being reticent. When I got home at two a.m., I sent him a private thank-you note for his encouragement before collapsing into bed. He answered at seven the next morning, and it was unclear if he had slept in the interim.

  "You did a great job," he wrote. Your changes were all well written, thoughtful, and you defended them based on your understanding of Google, the founders, and the history of how we've handled prose for the last five years. There is no one in the company who could have been more effective. You came through in a big way last night for the cause." He copied the message to the entire executive team.

  Suddenly I felt bad about the whole carwash thing.

  I'd like You to Be the First to Know

  "Please come to a company meeting today at 11:30 in the TGIF area," said the email that went out to all Googlers on Thursday, April 29, at eleven a.m. "Full-time employees only, please. Be prepared to show your ID badges."

  The TGIF area was Charlie's Café. By the time I arrived at eleven-fifteen, the building was packed. Every Googler I'd ever seen, and many I'd never met, either sat in the rows of folding chairs or leaned over the balcony railing.

  At the front of the room, four microphone stands stood on the low stage, waiting, each mic covered with a windscreen in one of the Google logo colors. The mics were not the wireless ones Larry preferred, because our security manager worried that someone outside the building could pick up the signal from a wireless mic. The wall at the back was made of three-foot-wide perforated metal panels that curved in a semicircle and stretched to the ceiling. A row of potted plants marked the front of the stage, and two banners printed with enlarged Google doodle logos hung at the back. On one banner, Albert Einstein peered out of an o. On the other, two aliens sat on the letter g and looked down from the moon on a rising earth.

  Craig Silverstein, Google's first employee, sat on the floor facing the stage, and an interpreter for the deaf faced the other way, s
igning for one of our hearing-impaired engineers.

  Larry and Sergey walked in with Eric and Omid. Larry leaned against the railing as Sergey walked onstage. Sergey grinned and stepped up to the microphone with the bright green cover. He wore a black long-sleeved t-shirt and gray jeans.

  "Thank you for coming," he said to the hushed assemblage. Pause. "I just wanted you to be the first to know..." Nervous giggles from the crowd. Pause. "that I just saved a fortune on my auto insurance."* The laughter shook the walls. We all knew why we were there. In the half hour after the note went out announcing the meeting, our press release had crossed the wire. Google was going public.

  News vans were parked in a row down the street outside, microwave antennas extended, satellite dishes up, and light-diffusing scrims positioned for on-camera interviews. A helicopter buzzed overhead as security guards stood watch from the parking lot entrances.

  Omid gave an encore performance of his greatest TGIF hits, with slides showing what we hadn't been allowed to see in months. Our revenue was so far up and to the right that the purple bars were pushing off the top of the screen.

  Eric spoke and reminded us not to be distracted by all that was about to happen. Not to let the company's culture change, not to get caught up in the hype.