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

  One of my dirty little secrets was a complete lack of academic preparation for the business world. Instead of statistics and economics, I'd taken planetary geology, Latin, and Spenserian verse. Fortunately, Annie Skeet, my boss at the Mercury News, had a Harvard MBA and a desire to drive some business theory into my thick skull. She had given me a stack of her old textbooks along with strong hints that I should read them. I had found a couple of titles interesting, including Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy and David Aaker's books on branding.

  I began regurgitating everything I could remember onto the paper in front of me: the five P's (or was it six?), the four M's, barriers to entry, differentiation on quality or price. By the time Sergey came back, I had enough to talk for ten minutes and was confident I could fill any holes with the three B's (Buckets of Baffling Bullshit). I went to the whiteboard and furiously drew circles and squares and unleashed arrows like Legolas. I was nervous, but not very. Sergey bounced on a ball and asked questions that required me to make things up on the spot.

  "What's the most effective barrier to entry?"

  "What's more important: product differentiation or promotion?"

  "How does the strategy change if the price is zero?"

  He seemed to be paying attention, and I began enjoying myself. We were developing a special rapport! Clearly, he wanted to hear what I had to say and valued my opinions. Later I found out that Sergey did this with everyone he interviewed. An hour wasted with an unqualified candidate wasn't a total loss if he gained insight into something new.

  The light was fading by the time I finished, and Sergey invited me to join the staff for dinner, which was being brought into a small kitchen across from the conference room. A crowd of hungry engineers bounced from platter to platter with chopsticks picking at a large selection of sushi.

  "We just hired a chef, so this is a temporary setup," Sergey confided. "And we've got a couple of massage therapists coming in as well."

  A warning light flashed in my head. This was the guy who didn't think there should be a marketing budget, and he had hired a chef and dual massage therapists? But then I saw the platters of fatty tuna and shrimp and salmon and yellowtail. I grabbed some chopsticks and began loading my plate. Concerns about a business plan and revenue streams and organizational structure faded away. Google met most of my requirements. It offered at least the appearance of superior Internet-related technology, some eccentric genius types, funding that should last at least a year, and a fun consumer brand that I could help develop. And sushi. I could always bail for the next startup or get my old job back when Google ran out of money. In the meantime, I thought, I'll eat well and maybe learn something useful.

  Two weeks later, on November 29, 1999, I started work as Google's online brand manager.

  Day the First

  On my first day, I showed up before nine to make sure I gave a good initial impression to my new teammates. My khakis were clean, my polo shirt wrinkle free. I'm not sure the three or four Googlers who straggled in before ten in their shorts, sandals, and Google t-shirts really noticed. It turns out that engineers prefer to phase-shift their work schedules and start after the morning rush hour is well past. It's more efficient to get to work when traffic is light and to go home when everyone else is already asleep. And anything that needs to be ironed is automatically on the losing end of a cost-benefit analysis. Efficiency, I would learn very quickly, is valued highly among those who live to make things work better.

  The office space was even more Spartan in the daytime than it had appeared during my evening interview. One large room held a dozen desks made of wooden doors mounted on metal sawhorses. There were small offices scattered around the perimeter, each occupied by at least two workstations sporting large-screen monitors. Many of the screensavers displayed the raining green English and Japanese characters popularized by The Matrix. A single bookshelf crammed with programming books was tucked into a corner. I felt as if a crew of small-parts assemblers might show up any minute, cover the tables with soldering guns and pieces of metal, and begin making toasters or robot dogs or locking mechanisms for seat belts. Generically utilitarian would be a generous description.

  Google was leasing the top floor of a two-story building and had originally occupied only half of the available area. The technical staff were all tucked into that space because the engineers were literally the core of the company. Great things would come from packing them tightly together so that ideas bounced into one another, colliding and recombining in new, more potent ways.

  My new space was in "the annex," the other half of the floor. It was completely raw: cables draped from the ceiling above an uncarpeted concrete floor in a wide-open space interrupted only by cement pillars and, oddly enough, a disco ball left behind by a previous tenant. A couple of offices off to the side had been completed by the time I joined, and I was assigned to one with Aydin Senkut, another newbie, who worked in business development. Aydin lived on his constantly ringing cell phone, which he considerately stepped outside to answer so he could yell at the callers in Turkish without disturbing me. My laptop was new and very fast.

  I had been hired during one of the company's first big staffing ramp-ups, and there were many new faces besides mine and Aydin's: Charlie Ayers, the Google chef; massage therapists Babette Villasenor and Bonnie Dawson; webmaster Karen White; and Shari Fujii, the offline marketing manager. We joined the forty engineers and operations staff already in place and the dozen or so business-side staffers who made up the rest of the company.

  There was no organizational chart to consult for a quick status check, and the obvious signs demarcating relative importance to the organization were absent. Even Larry and Sergey shared an office, albeit a slightly larger one, just like everyone else. Titles were generic. The position both Shari and I had applied for was "Marketing Director" according to Google's website, though that position didn't actually seem to exist. Google preferred to call us "managers." I shrugged my shoulders and swallowed my pride.

  "Titles aren't important," Sergey reminded us on a regular basis. "We'll all do better if we have a flat organization with few levels to facilitate communication and avoid bureaucracy." I accepted the startup assumption that success would float all boats and decided not to get hung up on traditional progress mileposts like money and prestige. After twenty years of working toward my next pay raise and a chance to level up on the corporate org chart, what I did in the office would become an end unto itself. I hadn't felt the same mixture of liberation and anxiety since the day I stuck my diploma in a drawer and first opened a help-wanted section.

  I spent the next eight hours settling in, collecting Google's standard-issue mechanical pencils and quadrille-ruled lab books from a metal file cabinet and arranging my stapler and tape dispenser and docking station and inbox until my desk was exactly balanced. I was ready, but not sure for what.

  I took a personal inventory. Two decades in marketing had taught me many practical things, from how to build consensus across divisions to how to write a CYA memo when I wanted to color outside the lines. I viewed that experience as an important asset but was beginning to suspect that within the walls of the Googleplex,* it might be valued differently. I had wanted to live the Silicon Valley startup life, with its complete lack of longstanding rules. Now, poised on the precipice of realizing that dream, I asked myself, "My God. What have I done?"

  Chapter 2

  In the Beginning

  HEY, WANT TO see something cool?" Jay asked me, standing in the micro-kitchen eating from a cup of yogurt, barefoot and sporting pajama pants, a well-loved sweatshirt, and a graying ponytail.

  "Sure," I said, though I couldn't imagine anything cooler than the kitchen itself. One entire wall was lined with bins of granola and cereal. Other bins were filled with Gummi Bears, peach gels, M&Ms,* nutrition bars, and instant oatmeal. Caffeinated and carbonated beverages chilled inside illuminated Google-branded coolers. Boxes of soy milk and Rice Dream stood stacked in the corn
ers. A toaster and a new white breadmaker gleamed on the counter next to the sink.

  I'd been at work almost a week and was getting the lay of the land. Jay and Radhika, both engineers and parents, were the only ones who arrived at the office as early as I did, perhaps because we all had kids to drop off on the way. Jay was around my age and a veteran of the Valley who had already been at Google more than a month, making him a valuable source of knowledge about the corporate culture.

  I followed him toward a row of glass offices in the engineering zone. He pointed to a large K'nex roller coaster stretching the length of two desks set end to end. "I built this one day when I needed a break from coding," he said as he turned it on. We watched as a little gray-wheeled cart climbed to the summit and then raced downhill into a loop de loop.

  "That is pretty cool," I gushed, but not about the roller coaster. I'd already noticed that Jay worked what, to me, were reasonable hours and left in the late afternoon to pick up his kids. Despite the prevailing conception of startups as Silicon Valley's sweatshops, Jay's kick-back attitude convinced me I'd be able to work at Google, help raise our children, and even find time for my own personal development. Pretty cool indeed.

  It was a happy fantasy.

  My life balance was about to get knocked on its inner ear. In less than a year I would be working sixteen-hour days and Jay would depart Google to pursue personal goals that were at odds with those of the company.

  What were Google's goals in late 1999? Hell if I knew. We were a search engine. What did search engines do? They searched. I assumed that we wanted to be the best damn search engine on the planet. Even better than AltaVista. It seemed unlikely we'd ever be a giant like Yahoo, given their head start, but maybe someday we'd be big enough to make Inktomi share the market for supplying portals with technology. There were no mouse pads imprinted with our mission statement or motivational posters on the walls urging us to surpass our sales targets as there had been at the Merc. If Googlers, or anyone else, had a clear vision of the company's future, they kept it hidden. And not just from me.

  "I had lunch with Sergey and another engineer and it was clear they had a search engine," said engineer Ed Karrels, who in 1999 was trying to decide if he should leave SGI for a job at Google, "but everybody and their brother had a search engine in those days. I asked, 'Where are you going with this? How will you make money?' And Sergey said, 'Well ..., we'll figure something out.' I asked, 'Do you already have a plan figured out and you're collecting smart people to make it happen?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's pretty much it.'" Very reassuring.

  I had worked for a startup in the eighties, joining a group of former auditors with an idea that would revolutionize health-care marketing. They set up shop in San Francisco next to a former garage that now housed a Chinese restaurant. The place was soaked in adrenaline and constantly shifting direction. Change, change, change. Charge ahead. No back. I left after three months, and a few weeks later the company disappeared. I learned that hyperactivity wasn't the same as productivity. Google, however, gave off a different vibe.

  A big part of that was the people I met.

  "Hi, I'm Jim," said the guy who came by to give me my laptop and set up my phone. "Jim Reese. I should have this done in a jiffy." Something about him reminded me of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man: the open and friendly attitude, the hair parted way over on one side, the whiff of geekiness I detected as he crawled under my desk, whipped out a screwdriver, and began adeptly fiddling with one of the jacks.

  I later learned that Google had hired Jim as a systems administrator (sysadmin) because the early engineers were all coders and not so good with hardware. It wasn't what Jim had been trained to do at Harvard, at Yale Medical School, or in his neurosurgery residency at Stanford, but somewhere along the line he had developed an interest in computer networking and had ended up on the phone with Urs Hölzle, Google's head of engineering. Recruiters from other companies had spent their interview time selling him on the jobs they were offering. Not Urs.

  "Urs said nothing about coming to the company," Jim recalls. "Every single question was like, 'Tell me how many bits there are in a netmask for a slash 28 network.' Then he started drilling down from there." That focus on the technology had convinced Jim to sign on.

  The day in June 1999 when Jim started as Google employee number eighteen, his orientation took less than a minute. "Here's your space over here," Larry directed him. "There are a bunch of parts over there. Make your own computer." It was the same for the next guy hired: Larry "Schwim" Schwimmer, who took responsibility for Google's mail and security systems.

  I stopped by the office Schwim shared with Jim so he could sign me up for a company email account. A large stuffed penguin, the mascot for the Linux operating system our engineers used instead of Windows, sat in a folding chair next to a model of the human skull left over from Jim's med school days. The room felt cramped, as most Google offices did, and was crowded with wires and RAM and computers in various states of assembly. Schwim peered from behind his monitor with the distracted look of someone whose mind was elsewhere—like John Malkovich in that movie where a puppeteer took command of his brain.

  "You're the first Doug," Schwim told me. "Do you want [email protected]?" I did. I felt a strange tingle as I thought about the implication of that. The first Doug. Among certain sets in Silicon Valley, your email address indicates more about you than the car you drive or the clothes you wear. I liked the status doug@google conferred on me as an early adopter.

  I'd see a lot of "Jim and Schwim," as they came to be called. Their group, known as operations or ops, took charge of building and maintaining all the machines running Google. Larry had given Jim a list on his second day, in priority order, of the top one hundred things he wanted done. Number one was "to make sure we had enough capacity to run the site and if there are problems, solve them or find someone to solve them."

  "The first year I got nine done," Jim confessed with a hint of pride. "And in the subsequent five years, I got through fifteen of them." Jim's job wasn't defined by the list, however, just as I was about to learn that mine wasn't defined by my somewhat generic "marketing manager" title. As Jim pointed out, "When there were problems to be solved, whoever could solve them did, regardless of what their official title was."

  CableFest '99

  "We've got some work to do at our data center on Saturday," Cindy informed all of us in the marketing group toward the end of my first week on the job. "Bring warm clothes, because I understand it can get a bit chilly in there." It was our formal invitation to "volunteer" at Google's CableFest '99.

  I was no expert on computer hardware. I had read an article or two about servers, hubs, and routers, but I pronounced "router" as if it rhymed with "tooter" instead of "outer." Given my profound lack of technical expertise and my bad computer karma, why would any company allow me in the same room as its computational nerve center? That requires a bit of explanation.

  In late 1999, Google began accelerating its climb to market domination. The media started whispering about the first search engine that actually worked, and users began telling their friends to give Google a try. More users meant more queries, and that meant more machines to respond to them. Jim and Schwim worked balls-to-the-wall to add capacity. Unfortunately, computers had suddenly become very hard to get. At the height of the dot-com madness, suppliers were so busy with big customers that they couldn't be bothered fending off the hellhounds of demand snapping at Google's heels. A global shortage of RAM (memory) made it worse, and Google's system, which had never been all that robust, started wheezing asthmatically.

  Part of the problem was that Google had built its system to fail.

  "Build machines so cheap that we don't care if they fail. And if they fail, just ignore them until we get around to fixing them." That was Google's strategy, according to hardware designer Will Whitted, who joined the company in 2001. "That concept of using commodity parts and of being extremely fault tolerant, of writing the software in
a way that the hardware didn't have to be very good, was just brilliant." But only if you could get the parts to fix the broken computers and keep adding new machines. Or if you could improve the machines' efficiency so you didn't need so many of them.

  The first batch of Google servers had been so hastily assembled that the solder points on the motherboards touched the metal of the trays beneath them, so the engineers added corkboard liners as insulation. It looked cheap and flimsy, but it prevented the CPUs (central processing units) from shorting out. Next, Larry focused on using space more efficiently and cutting out as many expensive parts as possible. He, Urs, and a couple of other engineers dumped out all the components on a table and took turns arranging the pieces on the corkboard tray like a jigsaw puzzle.* Their goal was to squeeze in at least four motherboards per tray. Each tray would then slide into a slot on an eight-foot-tall metal rack. Since servers weren't normally connected to displays, they eliminated space-hogging monitor cards. Good riddance—except that when something died the ops staff had no way to figure out what had gone wrong, because they couldn't attach a monitor to the broken CPU. Well, they could, but they'd have to stick a monitor card in while the machine was live and running, because Larry had removed the switches that turned the machines off.

  "Why would you ever want to turn a server off?" he wondered. Perhaps because plugging a monitor card into an active computer could easily short out the motherboard, killing the whole machine.

  After the engineers crammed four boards onto each tray, the one in the back couldn't be reached from the front. To fix it the technician would have to pull the tray out of the rack, but the trays were packed so tightly that yanking on one would cause the trays directly above it and below it to start sliding. With cables wrapped around every surface like lovelorn anacondas, that could unplug everything and shut down the entire rack.