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

by Douglas Edwards

  When the floor was opened for questions, Keith Kleiner, an early employee from operations, walked to the mic. "I just want to say," he began, looking at Larry and Sergey, "thank you. You guys have done an incredible job building this company." The applause burst like a thunderclap from the seats, the aisles, the balcony. Within seconds, every employee was standing and cheering. Larry put his arm around Sergey's shoulder and beamed at the crowd. Sergey reciprocated. For two minutes, waves of unadulterated appreciation rolled over the founders as Eric stood to the side and pointed like a conductor at two virtuoso violinists.

  After the meeting we went back to our desks and back to work. I stayed there until after six, before packing up my laptop and heading to the Sports Page bar and grill around the corner. Affectionately known among Googlers as "The Shit Hole," it was a funky wood-and-plaster hut with a large back patio perfect for informal celebrations. Lori Park, one of the first engineers hired, had arranged to rent it out for a get-together of old-time Googlers. Salar was there, and Susan brought her kids. Bart from advertising operations and the biz dev guys who had come over from Netscape. Orkut, Ben Smith, and Ben Gomes showed up. Radhika, Ed Karrels, and Wayne. The Blogger guys. Craig and Georges. And Babette, who now supervised an army of Google massage therapists. I flashed back four years to Google in early 2000 and felt as close to my colleagues as I ever had. We had made this climb together, and for just a brief moment, we could pause and reflect on the journey that had brought us here.

  I had printed out a copy of the S-1 (as had most of the company—the printers hadn't stopped all day), and I walked around with a red Sharpie, collecting signatures on it from Larry and Sergey, Craig, and our chief legal officer, David Drummond. I wanted something tangible to prove I had been there, to freeze the moment when my Silicon Valley fantasy solidified into reality.

  I finished my beer and headed home.

  Money from Nothing

  The months that followed were not much different from the ones that had come before. The Gmail privacy issue finally settled down. Liz Figueroa abandoned her legislation. Cindy and I talked out the issues she had raised in her late-night flame mail. The tension eased, but the pressure didn't. I continued to put in long hours working on principles regarding scumware, and I fought for a Users' Bill of Rights that didn't make it past the executive committee.

  We launched a corporate blog, though it was risky given that we had entered a government-mandated "quiet period" as soon as we filed our S-1 statement. We couldn't post anything that might be perceived as promoting sales of our stock in the IPO. My first post was about recruiting for our European office. My second post was an apology for editing the first post after it had already gone up. I was still learning new things, like blogger etiquette.

  I kept knocking my head against the wall between corporate marketing and product management and got little more than a migraine for my efforts. I went to Marissa's weekly launch meetings but had only occasional glimpses into products that were early in development. One of those was desktop search, which now was called "Fluffy Bunnies," because its original name, "Total Recall," had been deemed too scary from a privacy standpoint. Fluffy Bunnies would index the hard drive on a personal computer and make it searchable. I argued vehemently that we needed to give users a warning up front—"This product is not like others you may have used. Please read the privacy policy carefully"—but my tone was considered too alarmist. I did convince the team to use the descriptive line "Search your own computer," though Marissa found it colloquial, redundant, and "lame, lame, lame."

  The CIA bought one of our Google Search Appliances for their intranet and asked if they could customize our logo by replacing an O with their seal. I told our sales rep to give them the okay if they promised not to tell anyone. I didn't want it spooking privacy advocates. "Do you think they can keep a secret?" I asked her.

  I hired a writer to take on some of the load—Michael Krantz, a funny, gifted journalist who had covered Silicon Valley for Time magazine and understood technology. He got the job because he put together a prospective April Fools' joke that made me laugh.

  Having writing help freed up some of my time, giving me the opportunity to attend the series of finance fairs Jonathan had arranged for the company, with representatives from firms like Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, and UBS explaining how to invest prudently and avoid excessive taxes. Many of these advisors had been randomly dialing every phone extension at Google for months, trying to line up clients before the IPO. I had ignored the calls, but now I was curious about what the professionals had to say. The IPO was coming in August and I needed to think about what it might mean for me.

  The road to the IPO was rocky. Larry and Sergey wanted to sell stock directly to the public through a Dutch auction, in which the stock price would be gradually lowered until all shares were sold. They thought that would be democratic and allow broad participation. They saw the traditional way of going public as a broken system. Wall Street investment banks insisted on pricing shares artificially low so that they popped up on the first day of trading and the banks made a killing on the shares they owned. To Larry and Sergey, it was deceptive and inefficient and only the banks benefited. They spurned the bankers and told them Google would do it differently. The bankers fought back, constantly bad-mouthing Google's stock, its management, and its idiosyncratic IPO process.* Estimates for the opening price of Google shares sank below the high end of one hundred twenty-five dollars because there was less demand than anticipated amid all the disparaging chatter and a sagging stock market.

  Admittedly, Larry and Sergey didn't help much. The report from their road show, in which they traveled to various cities flogging our offering to institutional investors, was that they weren't taking the presentation any more seriously than they took our weekly TGIF meetings. In other words, Sergey didn't look at the slides before speaking about them, and commented that the information they contained was wrong, or not very good, or of dubious origins. The energy levels were low, the handoffs sloppy, and the attitude so laid-back as to be disrespectful.

  People noticed. BusinessWeek reported that when Sergey was "asked about Google's strategy for growth," he said, "'If I tell you, you'll just ask again.'" The article also quoted "a different money manager with a billion-dollar Internet fund" as saying, "'They seem to think you should feel privileged [to buy Google stock]. That's the attitude—and it's a bizarre one.'"† The writer questioned whether Sergey had the maturity or the humility to run a major technology company and whether our founders would "be blinded by the sort of success that would go to anyone's head."

  "How can I win, Doug?" Cindy, who was on tour with them, asked me.

  "It's like living in a Greek tragedy," I told her. "These guys define hubris. I'm afraid it will be our downfall."

  The lack of deference seen as an asset in Silicon Valley didn't play well among the status-conscious players of the Wall Street establishment.

  Nor did the twenty-three million shares of stock we had neglected to register with the SEC before giving them to employees. Or the interview Larry and Sergey had done with Playboy the week before filing the S-1. We didn't think it would come out until after the IPO date, but on August 12, there it was on the PR department's fax machine, with a cover sheet from Playboy's editors saying, "Enjoy and Congrats!" We didn't enjoy, because the SEC made us include the full text of the article in our filing statement and pushed back our IPO a week.

  I took advantage of the unexpected break to arrange a quickie vacation to San Diego with Kristen and our kids, who barely recognized me anymore. A day before our planned departure, though, my wife's grandmother passed away. Kristen flew to Seattle for the funeral, and I stayed home with the children, doing loads of laundry, shopping for groceries, and playing board games while running to my laptop every few minutes to respond to emails about budgeting, trademarks, and trade show giveaways.

  It was an odd interregnum. My life had been moving so quickly, I hadn't taken a break
in what seemed like years. Now I was overcome by lethargy, perhaps induced by exhaustion or by the knowledge that I had become part of something larger and that, consequentially, my individual contribution had become less essential. In my early days at Google, if I didn't do the marketing tasks, they didn't get done. Now Google overflowed with PMs, APMs, PMMs, and APMMs eager to showcase their abilities.

  The Saturday before our scheduled offering, Jonathan put out the word that he had hired a director of product marketing. The era of corporate marketing had truly ended and the era of product marketing had formally begun.

  I cut my vacation short and returned to work early on Thursday, August 19—IPO day—to watch the circus. I drove by the TV trucks and into the parking lot. The auction for Google shares had ended, the initial price was set at eighty-five dollars, and when the markets opened, the world would tell us what it thought of the business we had built.

  There was no company meeting scheduled. Sergey was with us in Mountain View to set the proper tone: it was a Thursday like any other, and we needed to stay focused on the work ahead of us. The rest of the executives were at the NASDAQ, preparing to start the day's trading. Larry called Sergey, according to David Krane, and gave him a rundown. Not on the valuation he expected, but on the technology being used by the traders. "Here's what I'm looking at," Krane heard Larry tell Sergey. "Here's what the systems look like, and here's how much data is passing through. This is how fast it's updating. This is the resolution of the displays. This is how big the displays are, how many they have..."

  I joined a half dozen employees gathered around a TV mounted on the wall above the PR cubicles. On the screen, a bunch of people in suits stood before a large electronic display. I didn't recognize Larry at first, wearing a gray jacket, a white shirt, and a red tie. Was this the guy I had seen sweating on a locker room bench as he struggled out of his hockey pads? Eric stood to Larry's left and Omid looked over his shoulder, as Larry picked up a marker and signed his name on a glass screen, and by so doing, made them all billionaires. Someone standing behind me opened a single bottle of cheap champagne, poured it into paper cups, and passed it around. Then we went back to our desks.

  "The thing I remember about the IPO," Paul Bucheit told me recently, "is how much of a non-event it was. I was at Microsoft the day Windows 95 went gold,* and that was a huge party. I got in a little late, and the place was just destroyed. The carpet was torn up because someone brought a motorcycle inside. Tables were smashed and they had gone through some enormous amount of alcohol. It was a big deal. The IPO was not that big a deal. Everyone was just working. Kind of remarkable."

  Larry and Sergey did all they could to keep the company culture as it had been. Wayne Rosing told the engineers that he would personally greet anyone who showed up the next day driving a Ferrari, and that he would gladly redecorate the new car with his baseball bat. That didn't worry engineers Ed Karrels and Chad Lester. They hadn't bought sports cars; they had purchased airplanes.

  "It's not a Ferrari," Chad told Ed. "It's not a Lamborghini. Let's bring our planes in and land them on the road outside Google."

  They didn't. And anyone else who had splurged on a new toy left it at home. But things did change.

  Bart, the advertising operations guy who had so eagerly anticipated the IPO, took to practicing his putting on the lawn outside the front door at every opportunity. People tucked stock tickers discretely into corners of their laptop screens, though Larry and Sergey threatened to fine anyone they caught doing it. It became harder to hold meetings because the conference rooms were occupied by Googlers huddled with people wearing polished shoes and toting expensive leather briefcases.

  I was back at work and busy, but not as crazily busy as before. I had seniority plus a large group of product managers eager to pick up any slack. Cindy agreed to send me to China to learn the market and find a new Chinese name to replace our current brand there. While Yahoo's name translated as "elegant tiger," ours was rendered with characters that meant "old dog."*

  In October, Cindy asked me to run the logistics for our first earnings call, in which we would reveal our quarterly results and take questions from brokers and analysts. It would be our first time talking directly to investors, and the desire for perfection was amped even higher than usual. Larry, Sergey, Eric, and George, our CFO, sat in a conference room with an armed guard outside. I was next door, looking through the window with Cindy, Jonathan, and our operations and legal teams. There was a last-minute breakdown in communication with the outside investor-relations firm, but we established an instant messenger link and no one was the wiser. To the rest of the world the event came off flawlessly, keeping the focus on the reported numbers, which stunned the market. Google's stock shot up to almost two hundred dollars over the following week.

  Also stunned were my colleagues, when, at a party at Zibbibos after the earnings call, Cindy announced she was leaving Google. I had seen it coming. In fact, I had entertained thoughts along the same line. It seemed as if we had come to the end of a long story, and I wasn't sure I wanted to begin a new one. Cindy said she would stay another two months and leave in January. I decided to wait at least that long to see what the future held.

  Cindy had been my last and strongest ally in defending the role of branding that went beyond research, analytics, testing, and iteration—and now she was heading out the door. After her departure, I would report to the director of product marketing. He seemed very well-qualified for the job. He had earned degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, had worked as a business strategist for a consulting firm, and had been a VP of global product marketing for a major networking company. He was exactly what Google was looking for, and that meant I no longer was.

  Three weeks after Cindy left, the director of product marketing called me into his office. I knew he wanted to talk about slotting, the process established in product management to determine where on the org chart an individual best fit.

  "Doug," he said, "I'm having a hard time slotting you. I don't really see where you fit. There doesn't seem to be a place for, 'brand management' in the organization as a functional role."

  I could have made the case that I deserved one of the predefined jobs in product marketing and negotiated for the most senior position available. I had no desire to do that. I could have protested, tried to explain the value of my work, and insisted a slot be created for my function. I knew I would never be able to provide sufficient data to back that up. Instead, I agreed with him. There was no longer a role at Google for what I did. I would wind things down as Cindy had, and leave in two months.

  I picked March 4, 2005, as my last day: "Three. Four. Five." I liked the architectural purity of it.

  When the day arrived, I said my farewells. There were many people at my sendoff I hadn't seen in a long while. Larry shook my hand and wished me well. Charlie baked me a cake. Marissa surprised me by giving me a hug and saying she had always respected my judgment, though she hadn't always agreed with it. I surprised myself by admitting I felt the same about her.

  I went back to my office to finish some edits on Sergey's letter for the annual report, emailed it to him, then shut down my computer and turned it in to the help desk. I cut up my corporate credit card and left it on my manager's chair.

  My exit interview was brief and with an HR staffer I had never met before.

  It was late when I went out to the parking lot and climbed into the Taurus. I put the key in the ignition and turned it. I sat for a moment, breathing. In my mirror loomed a large array of buildings occupied by a powerful global enterprise. Its logo stared at me from across a grassy embankment, a motley assortment of brightly colored letters on a white signboard.

  I had started at a small startup as a big-company guy. Now I was leaving a big company as a small-startup guy.

  I put the car in reverse, backed out of the slot, and drove home.

  You Must Remember This

  A cold fog wafted out of the open fre
ezer in front of me. It was a week after my last day at Google, and Kristen had sent me on a night run to Safeway to pick up some milk for the next day's breakfast. As always, I was going off-list; picking up a few items with more sugar and fat than nutrition. I squinted at the tags on the shelf below the different brands of ice cream. What I really wanted was Starbucks Java Chip, but I only bought that when it was on sale. I reached for the Safeway store brand.

  My hand froze, but not from the cold. "I want Java Chip," a voice said inside my head.

  "It's not on sale," another voice answered automatically, in a monotone.

  "It's. Not. On. Sale," the first voice replied with mimicking sarcasm. "So ...," it went on, spacing the words for emphasis, "what?" I picked up a carton of Java Chip and put it in my cart.

  For the very first time, I was doing something differently because of Google's success.

  Hitting the startup jackpot was like leaving Flatland, the world hypothesized in a geometry-based novel I had read as a kid.* In Flatland, the characters moved along a single, two-dimensional plane and only perceived objects as points or lines. That had been my life, and I had never realized it. Go to work, make money, come home, sleep. Repeat. Now, though, I had the ability to move in all dimensions. The tethering constraints of grocery bills and mortgage payments had been severed and I was floating free.

  Some Googlers used their new freedom to change their lifestyles, their cars, their homes, their careers, their spouses. For me, all that open sky was disconcerting. I clung to the familiar to anchor myself. It was surprisingly hard to do that without a job.

  I had practiced the marketing arts in one form or another for twenty-five years, and I didn't want to do it anymore. The position I left at Google had been the pinnacle—the best job I could imagine for someone in my field. I had watched over a brand that exploded from obscurity to dictionary definition in five short years. My colleagues were some of the most brilliant people on earth. I traveled the globe and made my fortune. I learned things about my limits and my capabilities. And I like to think that, in some small way, I helped advance the human condition. Or at least that I did more good than harm.