How Google Built Its Culture
One day in 2005, Marissa Mayer was trying to explain why the looniness of Google was actually the crazy-like-a-fox variety and not the kind calling for straitjackets. Responding to the company’s ventures beyond search, outsiders had been charging that Google was out of control, tossing balls into the air like a drunken juggler. And that was before Google decided to remake the energy industry, the medical information infrastructure, the book world, radio, television, and telecommunications. She conceded that to an outsider, Google’s new-business process might indeed look strange. Google spun out projects like buckshot, blasting a spray and using tools and measurements to see what it hit. And sometimes it did try ideas that seemed ill suited or just plain odd. Finally she burst out with her version of the corporate Rosebud. “You can’t understand Google,” she said, “unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”
“Montessori” refers to schools based on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue what interested them.
“It’s really ingrained in their personalities,” she said. “To ask their own questions, do their own things. To disrespect authority. Do something because it makes sense, not because some authority figure told you. In Montessori school you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do it that afternoon, not because the teacher said so. This is really baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems. They’re always asking ‘Why should it be like that?’ It’s the way their brains were programmed early on.”
Both Brin and Page were certainly smart enough and sufficiently self-aware to understand the disrupting impact of unconventional behavior, but it’s as if somewhere along the line—Montessori?—they made independent decisions to act on impulse—even if the results sometimes were, as Mayer says, “mildly socially mortifying.”
Larry—do you realize you just questioned the physical constant to [famed inventor] Dean Kamen? Are you sure you’re right about that?
Sergey—you just asked Colin Powell whether he made the right moves in Desert Storm. Seriously, you’re talking to Colin Powell!
Then there was the time in St. James’s Palace, when they were having dinner with the queen’s husband, Prince Philip. The pomp was intense, a multicourse formal menu. The waiters brought out soufflés along with tiny glasses of passion fruit juice to adorn them, like a syrup. Mayer did what was expected—she mashed down her soufflé and poured the juice over it; otherwise it would have been too dry. She looked on in horror as Larry Page picked up the glass and downed it like a tequila shot. Sergey did the same. Prince Philip looked stunned. Later Marissa explained that the juice was to be regarded as a syrup to flavor the soufflé. She recalls their response with a mixture of awe and repulsion: “Who says?”
“Their attitude is just like, ‘We’re Montessori kids,’” said Mayer. “We’ve been trained and programmed to question authority.”
Thus it wasn’t surprising to see that attitude as the foundation of Google’s culture. “Why aren’t there dogs at work?” asked Marissa, parroting the never-ending Nerdish Inquisition conducted by her bosses. “Why aren’t there toys at work? Why aren’t snacks free? Why? Why? Why?”
“I think there’s some truth to that,” says Larry Page, who spent his preschool and first elementary school years at Okemos Montessori Radmoor School in Michigan. “I’m always asking questions, and Sergey and I both have this.”
Brin wound up in Montessori almost by chance. When he was six, recently emigrated from the Soviet Union, the Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, was the closest private school. “We wanted to place Sergey in a private school to ease up his adaptation to the new life, new language, new friends,” wrote his mother, Eugenia Brin, in 2009. “We did not know much about the Montessori method, but it turned out to be rather crucial for Sergey’s development. It provided a basis for independent thinking and a hands-on approach to life.”
“Montessori really teaches you to do things kind of on your own at your own pace and schedule,” says Brin. “It was a pretty fun, playful environment—as is this.”
He was gesturing to his surroundings in an odd little loft in the Googleplex that is restricted to the founders. It was a combination of a rich child’s bedroom and an exhibit hall in the National Air and Space Museum. The floor was covered with an AstroTurf-like carpet. There were sports equipment, game tables, and an astronaut’s suit. A giant Apple display glowed on his desk. The aerie overlooked a savannah of cubicles with shelves lined with gizmos, yurtlike conference rooms, and countless microkitchens equipped with goodie-stuffed fridges and high-end espresso machines. Red physio balls were scattered here and there. The workplace was similar to those in more than a dozen buildings within scooter range here in Mountain View and in Google offices in New York, Kirkland, Moscow, and Zurich. Google offices appeared to be a geek never-never land for unspeakably brainy Lost Boys (and Girls). If you looked closely, though, there were endless bureaucratic structures—data-driven, logically drawn schemata—that kept a $23 billion business humming.
As an indication of this, Brin’s elementary school reverie was interrupted by an unusual occurrence in the Googleplex—a brief power brownout that dimmed the lights. Brin bolted from his chair to his terminal, where he quickly accessed a software dashboard that monitored the building’s electrical system and determined that it was an anomaly. “That’s like the beginner of a Terminator movie!” he said, shrugging it off.
As a corporation, Google was determined to maintain its sense of play, even if it had to work to do it. The high holy day of Google culture is April 1, when imaginations already encouraged to run wild are channeled into elaborate pranks requiring months of work. The effort involves considerable organization, as ideas go through an elaborate approval process to find a place in the company’s ever-increasing roster of seasonal spoofs. The need for some oversight became clear as early as 2000, when Brin sent employees an email announcing that Google had a new valuation (meaning the estimate of its market price had gone up) and would soon reprice its employee stock options—from 25 cents to $4.01. Some people didn’t realize that $4.01 was a reference to the calendar and frantically tried to buy up all the shares that they were entitled to before the price went up. They dug into savings and borrowed from their families. Google eventually had to make people whole.
Google’s external April Fool’s joke that year was an announcement of “MentalPlex,” a search engine that reads your mind, eliminating the need to type in queries. This started an odd succession of self-parodying jokes, where a seemingly outrageous April Fool’s announcement, often involving a step in moving Google toward omniscience, omnipresence, or consciousness, reflected Brin and Page’s actual dreams. (In 2009, there was a complicated announcement of a system called CADIE—Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity.) As the years went on, more Google divisions felt compelled to devise their own jokes, and by 2010 Wikipedia listed seventeen major April Fool’s initiatives for that year alone.
If April Fool’s was an indulgence of the founders, it must be said that indulgence is spread around at Google. Early in its history, Google instituted a “20 percent rule,” stating that employees can devote one day a week, or the equivalent, to a project of their choosing, as opposed to something imposed by a manager or boss. The idea was Page’s, inspired by similar programs at HP and 3M (supposedly, Post-it notes came from such a spare-time effort). In practice, the self-directed labors often came in addition to a full week’s work. Thus the companywide joke that such endeavors were actually “120 percent projects.” But people participated anyway, and some important products, including Google News, came from the program.
You could even see the company’s work/play paradox in its bathrooms. In some of Google’s loos, even the toilets were toys: high-tech Japanese units with heated seats, cleansing water jets, and a control panel that looked as though it could run a space shuttle. But on the side of the stall—and, for men, at an eye-level wall placement at the urinals—was the work side of Google, a sheet of paper with a small lesson in improved coding. A typical “Testing on the Toilet” instructional dealt with the intricacies of load testing or C++ microbenchmarking. Not a second was wasted in fulfilling Google’s lofty—and work-intensive—mission.
It’s almost as if Larry and Sergey were thinking of Maria Montessori’s claim “Discipline must come through liberty…. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself.” Just as it was crucial to Montessori that nothing a teacher does destroy a child’s creative innocence, Brin and Page felt that Google’s leaders should not annihilate an engineer’s impulse to change the world by coding up some kind of moon shot.
“We designed Google,” Urs Hölzle says, “to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free.”
From the very beginning, Page and Brin had an idea of how Google would be different. “Even when we were three people, we had a culture,” says Craig Silverstein, the first person hired by the founders. “Partly it’s just our personalities, and partly it was the vision that we had for the company.”
That culture took shape even as Page and Brin changed Google from a research project to a company and moved off the Stanford campus. Susan Wojcicki, who owned the house that hosted the company after it moved from Stanford, thought that Google’s origins in a residential setting, with all the comforts of home, set a tone for the eventual bounty of amenities the company would offer its employees. “Because they were working out of a house, they realized that a lot of these conveniences are really important to have,” she says. “For example, having a shower is really important. When you’re attracting a really young group that’s mostly come out of college, having these services is pretty important, like having the food around, having a washer and dryer.”
The Google half of her house, separated from her kitchen by a flimsy door, consisted of a garage packed with equipment; two small rooms used as offices by factotum Heather Cairns and Harry “Spider-Man” Cheung; and a back room with several desks where Sergey, Larry, Craig Silverstein, and another engineer worked, with a view of the backyard and hot tub. Their desks were doors on sawhorses, a setup that would become a Google tradition. “Being a house, it didn’t have a lot of core things you want from a business,” Wojcicki says. “It didn’t have a lot of parking, and you can’t park on the street in Menlo Park at night. And also, they needed a cable modem to get Internet access. I thought it was great, because I got free cable out of it.” (The servers were off-site.)
Wojcicki believes the fabled Google perk of free food began the day Sears delivered the refrigerator she ordered. Her intention was to stay around the house that day so she could instruct the deliveryman to install it in her kitchen; it was intended for her and her husband. But she was in the shower when the truck arrived. “Sergey and Larry answered the door and said, ‘Oh, a new refrigerator! Install it here, in the garage!’” By the time Wojcicki realized what had happened, she was the unintentional benefactor of the first Google snack station.
“We just had to be clear about the rules,” says Wojcicki. When guests came to Google, they had to enter by the garage; using the front door would mean traipsing through her home. There was the occasional weird moment, like the meeting at Intel, where she worked. Her coworkers were talking about this hot new start-up called Google. “They work from my house,” she said, drawing astonished stares. Generally, she loved being the landlady. She could have contractors come by even when she was at work. “I would say, ‘The electrician’s going to come, show him the light that needs to be fixed.’” Her husband traveled a lot, and when she got lonely, she would go to the other side of the house and talk to the Googlers. After a number of late-night sessions when she’d heard Larry and Sergey’s dreams time and again, she quit Intel to join Google herself. Eventually Sergey began dating her sister. (Anne Wojcicki and Sergey would marry in 2007.)
In early 1999, Google moved to its new office space on University Place in Palo Alto, over the bicycle shop. The conference room had a Ping-Pong table, and, maintaining the tradition, the desks were doors on sawhorses. The kitchen was tiny, and food was yet to be catered. Larry and Sergey’s fondness for physio balls was apparent, as the red and blue plastic spheres were scattered about.
There is a special magic in a start-up of barely a dozen people whose entire existence centers around the shared dream of building the next Apple or Microsoft, only better. At the end of the night, when people who had families and homes with furnishings and air conditioners would otherwise have gone home, Google’s young engineers would engage in an iteration of the kind of rambling bull sessions they had experienced in college—only a year or two earlier. “We’re all working, like, a hundred and thirty hours a week and sleeping under our desk and doing all this stuff,” recalls Marissa Mayer. “But at two or three in the morning, the office would degenerate to us all sitting around on the couches and balls, chitchatting about what we’d do if there weren’t only ten or twelve of us,” says Mayer. Amping up the thrill was the fact that Google search was generating feedback and excitement far beyond the few cluttered rooms they occupied. Press notices were coming in. They were getting fan letters from librarians, scholars, schoolkids. This was real data indicating that Google actually could change the world. It was like some amazing logic drug.
Marissa Mayer would retain a strong memory of one moment from those late-night sessions. One of the engineers, Georges Harik, was sitting on one of the massive physio balls that Sergey would sometimes use as the end point of a running start and a big dramatic leap. (It freaked out visitors, and even some employees feared emergency room consequences.) Suddenly Harik bounded off it.
“I just want everyone to just savor this moment,” Georges said. “Look at how much fun this is. Look at these ideas. No matter what happens from right now on, it’ll never be as good as it is right now.”
Many years later, Marissa Mayer, when she had become an incredibly wealthy and much-admired figure in technology, a subject of numerous magazine covers and a decision maker who almost every day made complex calls affecting hundreds of millions of people, would look back at that moment, when all of Google could just about fit in an SUV. “Georges is brilliant, and he’s very rarely wrong,” Marissa would say. “But when he said that, he couldn’t have been more wrong.”
It would get much better.
From the outside, Google behaved like hundreds of start-ups before it, some that succeeded and many more that fell off the earth. Its employees worked hard, went on ski trips, and had parties where everybody wore tropical clothes, drank garish mixed cocktails, and wound up sitting in the kitchen listening to John McCarthy, the crusty Stanford AI pioneer who miraculously showed up. But those who spent time talking to Larry and Sergey knew that there was something special about them and their company. The two founders had already sketched a road map that struck observers as ludicrously grandiose. But their determination and confidence when they explained their vision imbued an almost hypnotic plausibility into their wild expectations. And there was that search engine they built, so good it was scary.
Page was more of the driver of the vision. “Larry always wanted it to be a bigger thing—as soon as the opportunity presented, it was full speed ahead,” says Craig Silverstein. “Sergey was consistent with that, but I don’t think he has that drive to the same extent that Larry does. I don’t feel as confident saying what would’ve happened had Sergey made all the shots.”
Less than a year after Google moved to University Avenue, the company had already outgrown the space. This time Page and Brin figured they would move into a space they could barely fill, assuming that it wouldn’t take terribly long to grow into it. They found a 42,000-square-foot space in Mountain View, just south of Palo Alto. It was one large building in a group, off a frontage road parallel to Highway 101: 2400 Bayshore Parkway. Through a contact they called on a real estate expert named George Salah, who handled facilities for Oracle. Only as a favor to his friend did Salah agree to eyeball the vacant building and give them some advice. He was surprised to learn that Google actually was looking for a full-time facilities manager, an unusual hire for a thirty-five-person company, as Google then was.
It was a summer day in 1999 when Salah dropped by after completing his day at Oracle. One cofounder, Page, was on Rollerblades. The other, Brin, was bouncing on a humongous red gym ball. Salah reported that the building needed some work but was generally fine. When the talk turned to his coming to work there, he challenged them. “What do you need me for?” he asked. “How do you see this company in five years?”
Their answer rocked him back on his heels. In five years, they said, Google would be half the size of Yahoo and have multiple international offices, data centers around the world, and a large cluster of buildings in Mountain View. “They’re mathematicians, so they’d already done the calculations,” says Salah. He took the job, and five years later, he compared their outrageous estimates to what actually happened. “They were right on,” he says. “They knew exactly what was coming.”
On August 13, 1999, everything was packed, from the monitors to the physio balls. Susan Wojcicki was monitoring the moving men from Graebal Van Lines as they trekked up and down the steps and lugged the boxes into the trucks. Followed by a video camera wielded by Harry the Spider-Man, she took one last spin around the Palo Alto offices, checking out the cubicles, the offices, the closet loaded with routers and telecom connections (already moved to Bayshore), and one office where the businesspeople had mistaken a white cork panel for a whiteboard and written sales figures on it. (Someone had draped a T-shirt over it to hide the numbers.) Her farewell tour was interrupted by one of the moving men, who had apparently been involved when Google had made its previous jump from her house to Palo Alto. He asked if she recalled how long it had been since that transfer.
“Six months,” she said, a little wistfulness and even some anxiety in her voice. “Does it seem like shorter or longer?”
The moving man shook his head. “You don’t like to stay in a place too long? Or is your company growing?”
“Our company is growing, that’s why,” she said.
“Now you can afford to get a place with an elevator,” said the moving guy. “So you know you’re doing good.”
The Bayshore Googleplex, also known as Building Zero, or the Nullplex, was the staging ground for Google to build out its culture into a sustainable corporate structure. No matter what happened, engineers would have the run of the place: their Montessori-inspired freedom would be Google’s distinguishing trait. One morning Salah came in and was startled to find that one of the engineers, Craig Nevill-Manning, had undertaken a midnight renovation. He had decided that he didn’t like his wall. His wall. He had gotten some of his colleagues to help and removed huge slabs of drywall. Nevill-Manning greeted Salah with a big smile. “I love this!” he said. “This is so much better than it was before!” Despite the fact that he was now facing a corridor where people were constantly passing by, sometimes on Segways or Rollerblades, Nevill-Manning claimed that he felt liberated. “So we went back and took the wall apart properly, and everything was fine,” says Salah. “And of course later he changed his mind and put the wall back. But he made it a more Googley environment.” As did Craig Silverstein, who would come to the office with loaves of homemade bread and walk through the corridors calling, “Bread! Bread!” and people would run out and grab slices.
Even though Google’s finances had improved after the $25 million infusion from the VCs, Salah was directed to buy cheaply. Brin and Page gloried in frugality and worried constantly about the opportunity costs of spending in areas that didn’t directly benefit search. Though they spared no expense for engineers, in other matters they were cheap. Salah, an experienced negotiator, would buy some furnishings from a busted dot-com and think he’d done pretty well. But Page and Brin would say to him, “Why don’t you see if you could get it for half that?” Salah would go somewhere else to get a price that pleased his bosses.
The sawhorse desks became a symbol of Google’s parsimony. So did the convention of identifying the inhabitants of a cubicle or office not by embossing the name on a piece of plastic but by pasting a printout of the name on a CD jewel box. Google would often buy furniture from fire sales held at the sites of failed dot-coms. “The mishmash allowed us to create a variety of work settings,” says Salah. To his relief, when Eric Schmidt arrived in 2001, the new CEO gave a thumbs-up to the mongrel style. “Don’t change a thing,” he told Salah. “Make sure it looks like a dorm room.”
As Salah learned more about the company and began furnishing the buildings that Google would later populate, he roughed out a set of design guidelines that expressed what he saw as Larry and Sergey’s values. The list centered on several “key performance principles.” The very first one: “Create a ‘Googley’ atmosphere.”
Being truly Google goes beyond painting the walls with bright colors and liberally distributing lava lamps. A Googley space is one that reflects—and supports—our employees. We are a diverse team of committed, talented, smart, thoughtful hard-working individuals. Our core values should be manifested in our work environment.
It didn’t take long for Google to begin growing out of Bayshore—the head count was doubling in size every few months as deals brought in new traffic, and the success of ads required a whole infrastructure of billing and business operations. Google began looking for more space in the vicinity. It leased a nearby building and moved in the business and sales operations; Googlers dubbed it the Moneyplex.
The center of gravity remained at Building Zero. It wasn’t just that Sergey and Larry were there, sharing an office loaded with hockey equipment and the shells of discarded servers. It was where the engineers were, and they were royalty at Google. Those who had gotten jobs at Google without computer science degrees—the people churning out tasks such as communications, billing, human resources, and even building facilities administration—weren’t exactly second-class citizens, but definitely a lower class of citizens. “There is an absolutely crystal-clear hierarchy at Google,” says Denise Griffin, who was hired at Google for a nontechnical job in 2000. “It’s engineers and everyone else. And if you want to be here, you have to, at some level, appreciate it.”
Still, Larry and Sergey’s mission to gather and organize all the world’s information—and the messianic buzz that came from making it happen—bound all Googlers together. At 4:30 every Friday afternoon, there was the all-hands meeting dubbed TGIF. The early TGIFs were just a way for Larry and Sergey to relay the latest news, introduce new employees, and maybe give someone a birthday wish. A highlight came when Omid Kordestani would stand up on a carton and announce the week’s financial results. The first time he was able to announce that Google made a profit, in 2001, the place went nuts.
Over the years the format of the TGIFs became more formalized, with better production values. Unless they are out of town, Larry and Sergey host the sessions. They always appear more comfortable addressing Googlers than speaking publicly. (As Google began opening offices around the country and the world, TGIFs were webcast to those locations.) They engage in teasing banter, hitting their marks with clever, if a bit nerdy, humor. First there is a greeting of Nooglers, employees who had just begun their Google careers. They wear beanies with propellers on top and get a round of applause when they sheepishly stand up to be identified. Next there is often a demo of a new program or some corporate initiative. Projected screens of thank-yous always accompany those for all the Googlers involved in the project.
The highlight of the TGIFs is always the no-holds-barred Q and A. Using an internal program called Dory, employees rate questions submitted online, with the more popular ones rising to the top. Brin and Page respond to even seemingly hostile questions with equanimity, answering them in all seriousness with no offense taken. In a typical session, someone asked why the newly hired chief financial officer had gotten such a big contract. Sergey patiently explained that the marketplace had set salaries high for someone filling that role and Google couldn’t fill it with a quality person if it underpaid. Someone else griped that the line at the café that served Indian food was too long and suggested that maybe Google should serve Indian food in additional cafés. Larry facetiously suggested that maybe the chefs should just make Indian food that didn’t taste as good.
The only time beer is regularly served in the Googleplex is after a TGIF. Nobody drinks too much, because it is only 5:30, and most people slip back to their computers for a few more hours’ work before the weekend.
By 2001, Google was looking for more space and began leasing buildings in the immediate area. In 2003, a bonanza came: an opportunity to take over the nearby campus of the troubled Silicon Graphics software company. At one time, SGI had been one of the hottest companies in the Valley. In the 1980s, it had built its headquarters as a statement of its success on the cutting edge of the effort to render the physical world into the pixilated bits of the new digital realm. Unexpected geometric shapes jutted from the buildings, as if a playful hacker had gone overboard with a CAD program, and sunlight hit the ample glass at odd angles. The four sprawling buildings encircled a long commons with a beach volleyball court and a spacious patio perfect for al fresco dining. According to a construction company that worked on the project, “This campus epitomizes virtual reality.”
But now SGI could no longer afford to occupy its beautiful complex and was looking for a company to replace it. Google’s offices were only a few hundred yards away. Salah did a walk-through and was impressed by how pristine the buildings were. He made a deal to lease the campus. (Google would later buy the property, along with the buildings that SGI had retreated to, a few blocks away on Crittenden Lane, for $319 million.)
The campus was located just east of the Permanente Creek, originally named Rio Permanente after the forces of Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza crossed it in 1776, on their way to establish a mission on what would later become San Francisco. To Googlers, though, the historic arroyo impeded shortcuts between the main buildings and later extensions of the campus to surrounding buildings that held other businesses. For a few days in 2008, some Google employees built and operated a zip line that let them coast over the ravine while hanging on to a tiny trapeze bar connected by pulleys to a cable bridging the gap. The city of Mountain View shut it down.
Salah was surprised that when Silicon Graphics occupied the building, all the cubicles had relatively high walls. And the desks were all oriented inward, with almost no one facing out. “So as you walk through the building, you couldn’t find a soul,” he says. “They were all there, you just didn’t know it. It was dead space.” His job, he felt, was to make it as alive as the company he worked for.
The key to vibrancy, he believed, was human density. Though the campus was built to accommodate around two thousand people, Silicon Graphics had had only 950 workers. Not long after Google took it over, it had more than nine hundred people in one building alone. Eventually there would be about 2,500 in those four large buildings. “We want to pack those buildings, not just because it minimizes our footprint but because of the interactions you get, just accidental stuff you overhear,” says Salah. “Walking around, you feel good about being here. And that’s what’s Googley.”
Page and Brin worked closely with Salah to make sure that the buildings expressed Google’s values. Those included design features that would promulgate not only good feeling and efficiency but their growing environmental consciousness. In Building 43, which would house the search teams as well as Page and Brin’s offices, Page insisted on sustainable and low-energy elements, including PVC-free Shaw carpets and automated solar MechoShade shades. (The building numbers on the new campus did not represent the count of Google’s structures, but were holdovers from the SGI numbering.) Page made Salah take samples of the air inside and outside the building. The results were excellent—toxic emissions well within the approved levels of the Bay Area Air Quality Management Control District and other government standards. “It was, like, .0001 parts per billion,” says Salah of the report he handed to Page. “Larry looked at it, handed it back and said, ‘Can we get this to zero?’” Google wound up building superpowerful fans to power a high-end filtration system. It made for a higher electric bill, but the air quality met Sergey and Larry’s standards. “They’re two very sensitive people,” says Salah. “They smell things most of us don’t smell.”
Until then Google’s culture had informally emerged from its founders’ beliefs that a workplace should be loaded with perks and overloaded with intellectual stimulation. The new campus formalized this inclination. The centerpiece and symbol of their view of the ideal work experience was free and abundant healthful food in an atmosphere that forged employee bonding and the sharing of innovative approaches to work. When new Googlers gathered for their orientation welcome session, the human resources person would explain that Google begins with the stomach. “We take our food very seriously—I’ve never seen an organization so fixated on food,” a human resource exec told a crowd of a hundred Nooglers in May 2009.
Brin and Page had been thinking about a free cafeteria ever since Susan Wojcicki’s house and had even talked to some local chefs about their working for the company when it moved to University Street. One of the candidates, Charlie Ayers, had asked Sergey why a company of twelve people needed a chef. As he had told George Salah, Brin said that the company was small at the moment but was destined to be huge. Nonetheless, the Palo Alto space was too small for food services, and the idea was shelved. 2400 Bayshore had sufficient space, however, so Google set up a café. Keeping employees on-site would not only save time but allow Googlers to mingle with all the newcomers who were arriving. Google posted an opening on its website for “an innovative gourmet chef.” The ad ended with a scrumptious carrot: “The only chef job with stock options!”
Ayers won the competition for the job. Beginning in November 1999, he cooked for the Google workforce, then numbering around forty. Since his résumé included occasionally preparing meals for the Grateful Dead, press accounts often described him as a former full-time chef for the band. (Google never made much of an effort to disabuse the media of that notion, and as the years went on, Charlie was thought to have been as much a part of Deadhead culture as Mountain Girl or Rick Griffin skulls.) He began cooking in a modest café at the Nullplex, but when Google moved into its Silicon Graphics campus, a huge multilevel space in Building 40 was designated Charlie’s Café. The food stations offered a dazzling bounty from various cuisines. And if the cafés weren’t enough to stuff you, the work areas themselves had countless microkitchens filled with snack foods, vitamin-infused water and other beverages, and high-end coffees, some of them brewed in complicated espresso machines whose operation often required every bit of a Googler’s IQ.
As huge as Charlie’s was, soon Google’s workforce grew too large to fit into it. Working with an outside caterer and a variety of chefs, Google built a cuisine complex that journalists loved to dwell upon. By 2008, it had eighteen cafés in Mountain View, spread over a couple of square miles of the campus, which continued to expand as Google snapped up nearby buildings abandoned by other Valley businesses. You could now drive down Charleston Road, which fronted the original Silicon Graphics campus, and for a half mile almost every building on both sides of the street sported the Google logo. Though Charlie’s in Building 40 was the most spacious café, with the broadest menu, food-snob Googlers regarded it as a tourist attraction; it was the place Googlers took their guests to, and it was often populated by people attending conferences on campus. The other eateries were more like restaurants beloved by a neighborhood clientele. Walking around Google offices, you would occasionally see charts to help a product group keep track of their lunch venues: a foodie version of the celebrated Traveling Salesman Problem.
At all the cafés, the menu choices reflected a proscriptive view of nutrition. Google chef Josef Desimone once told a magazine, “We’re here to educate employees on why agave-based soda is better for you than Coca-Cola.” Café 150 limited its menus to items grown or produced within 150 miles of campus. A café called 5IVE in another building prepared its dishes with five ingredients or less.
How much did it cost Google to provide great food to its employees? “It’s less than a rounding error,” says Sergey Brin. Stacy Sullivan, Google’s director of human resources, was a little more specific. When asked whether the rumored number of $17 a day per employee was accurate, she said, “I don’t have the exact amount—it could be $15, it could be $17. It’s some amount that’s not totally outrageous but significant.” (At $17, that’s a total of about $80 million a year for free food.)
Food was only the most notable of the other Google perks. Without leaving the campus you could see a doctor, do Pilates, get a Swiss massage. (Google’s masseuse, who wrote a book about her experience—she did not go the warts-and-all route—became a millionaire after the IPO.) Over time, Googlers would wind up with a closet full of corporate swag—jackets, caps, raincoats, umbrellas, fleece jerseys, prints, and more T-shirts than a U2 tour. At one point, Google gave employees backpacks full of survival gear in case of an earthquake.
“It’s sort of like the corporation as housewife,” wrote Googler Kim Malone in an unpublished novel. “Google cooks for you, picks up and delivers your dry cleaning, takes care of your lube jobs, washes your car, gives you massages, organizes your work-outs. In fact, between the massages and the gym, you’ll be naked at work at least three times a week. It organizes amazing parties for you. And if all that is not enough, there is a concierge service; you can just send an email and they’ll run any errand you want for $25 an hour.”
Seen another way, Google was simply a continuation of the campus life that many Googlers had only recently left. “A lot of Google is organized around the fact that people still think they’re in college when they work here,” says Eric Schmidt. Andy Rubin, who came to Google in 2004 when the company bought his mobile-technology start-up, guessed that since Brin and Page had never been in the workplace before founding Google, “they structured things from what they were familiar with, which was the PhD program at Stanford. You walk between buildings here and see people interacting like they would at a university. When we hire people, we grade the way they answer each question on a 4.0 basis, and if the average scores are below 3.0, we don’t hire them. We have these GPSs, Google Product Strategy meetings, that are run like PhD defenses.”
The Google campus hosted a constant flow of technical lectures by employees and visiting computer scientists. Google also sponsored an author series that featured several book talks every week, sometimes several appearances in a day. It regularly showed movies on campus, and when geek milestone films debuted, such as new installments of the Star Wars series, Google often bought out a theater and sprang employees early for the showing. Politicians, actors, and musicians made it a point to include a Mountain View campus visit on their schedules. “You get an email at two in the afternoon saying, ‘Hillary will be here at 5, drop by if you want to,’ and you do come to expect it,” says Devin Ivester, a longtime Googler. On a given day, you might hear Condoleezza Rice on foreign policy, Woody Harrelson on hemp farming, a reading from Barbara Kingsolver, or a Regina Spektor miniconcert. An otherwise obscure Googler, an engineer named Chade-Meng Tan—the job description on his card is “Jolly Good Fellow”—made it a point to get his picture taken with famous campus visitors. A montage of some of his greatest poses (with Bill Clinton, Muhammad Ali, Gwyneth Paltrow, Salman Rushdie, the Dalai Lama) was featured on a prominent wall in Building 43. (“I’m Chinese, so I give great Wall,” he would joke.)
Google even had its own version of the Learning Annex, called Google University. Besides a number of work-related courses (“Managing Within the Law,” “Advanced Interviewing Techniques”), there were classes in creative writing, Greek mythology, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and, for those contemplating a new career funded with Google gains, “Terroir: The Geology & Wines of California.”
In April 2010, a software engineer named Tim Bray blogged his experiences as a Noogler on a single day at Mountain View. He woke up at a Google Apartment, a temporary arrangement while visiting from his home base in Seattle. He caught a Google Bus to the campus, doing a bit of work using the Google Wi-Fi supplied to the passengers, arriving in time for free breakfast at one of the Google cafés. For lunch, a companion took him to the Jia café across a few parking lots, known for its excellent sushi. (Thursday was Hot Pot day.) Later in the afternoon he wanted to buy a new camera, so he borrowed one of the free electric-powered Toyota Priuses available to employees and drove to a Best Buy to make his purchase. At 6:30 p.m. someone said, “Dinner?” and he accompanied coworkers to yet another Google café, eating al fresco at picnic tables as the sun set over the lap pool, the beach volleyball court, and the full-size replica of a T. rex fossil nicknamed “Stan.”
Eric Schmidt loves comparisons of the Google lifestyle to the college experience. “The American university system is the greatest innovation engine ever invented,” he says. The only problem, he conceded, was the employees who cook up stratagems to actually live on Google’s campus. “But the fact of the matter is that for some people living here makes sense,” he says. “Their friends are here, it’s what they’re familiar with, and the things they do here are very similar to what they did in college.”
The personal perks are more than matched by Google’s aggressive efforts to provide ideal conditions for employees to actually do their work. Joe Kraus, an early Internet entrepreneur (he cofounded Excite) who inevitably wound up at Google after it bought his start-up company in 2008, was pleasantly stunned at the relentless attention to removing the impediments to productive work time.
He saw particular genius in the way Google provisioned its conference rooms. There are hundreds of these rooms at Google, named mostly after far-flung locations around the globe (e.g., Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso), scheduled in sixty-minute slots with Google’s web-based calendar software (many have small wireless displays by the door indicating who has booked the room for that day). Each room contains a large table with a slot in the center. Protruding out of that slot are snakes of cables from computer chargers for both Macintosh and Windows laptops. Thus no meeting will be delayed while someone dashes back to his office to get a charger. There are also cords that plug the computer into a projector that beams the display onto the wall—a standard companywide system so no one has to fumble while figuring out which protocol this room happens to demand. Likewise, for VC—which for almost all Googlers means “video conferencing,” and not the moneybags types who fund companies—there’s a single standard, and any Google employee could get a remote video connection going in her sleep. There is also a constantly replenished supply of pens and dry markers. Essentially, Google has eliminated a potential hundreds of thousands of downtime hours that employees would otherwise spend on housekeeping errands.
Even more time is saved by Google’s ubiquitous “tech stops” spread about the buildings: these are, in essence, tiny computer shops, indicated by neon markers. When a piece of equipment fails or there is a sudden need for a new mouse or phone charger, all a Googler needs to do is walk no more than a few hundred feet to one of those locations, and almost instantly he or she will be made whole.
That attitude extends to some of the corporate protocols that at other companies have employees gnashing their teeth at unfriendly, complicated systems that divert their efforts to filling out forms instead of actually working. For instance, when Googlers complained that the expenses process was a time-wasting drudgery, Google set up a corporate “G-Card” that automated the work. (In a Star Trek–themed video to explain the system, a Mr. Spock–like character said, “The G-Card is a Visa card accepted galaxywide. The Federation pays the bill for you. The charges teleport directly into the new expense reporting tool.”)
And if at any time a Googler had the urge to work standing up, podium style, or to use a physio ball as a desk chair, all that is required is to “file a ticket” on a site on the corporate intranet. Very quickly—often that day—someone appears to make the adjustments to the office to optimize the desk. “After trials and tribulations with many ergonomically correct chairs and exercise balls, I’ve found that just standing up while working is the best for me,” says Matt Waddell, who filed a “magic ticket” and had his podium less than twenty-four hours later.
The business perks were of a piece with the fuzzier amenities such as free food, T-shirts, and lectures by Jane Fonda. It was a holistic effort to make sure that when a Googler stressed out, the cause would more often be fear that Larry would kill their project than a broken phone or the inability to get a video connection with a collaborating engineer in Moscow. Such largesse was costly. Companies that treated employees more conventionally—or asked them to endure spartan conditions because of tough times—would dismiss Google’s approach as a spendthrift luxury possible only because of the company’s profitable business model. But Google was convinced that the money was well spent. This raised the question of whether even a cash-strapped corporation might do better by budgeting money to make its employees happier and more productive. Was it possible that such a workforce might be more likely to turn around a troubled company? If you were a highly sought after recruit out of college, how could such a contrast not affect you? If you were an employee who saw evidence every single day that your company valued your presence, would you not be more loyal? The Montessori kids who started Google thought about those questions and asked, Why? Why? Why? If Google ever hits really hard times, it will be telling to see whether the sushi quality falls and the power chargers disappear from the conference rooms.
Google took its hiring very seriously. Page and Brin believed that the company’s accomplishments sprang from a brew of minds seated comfortably in the top percentile of intelligence and achievement. Page once said that anyone hired at Google should be capable of engaging him in a fascinating discussion should he be stuck at an airport with the employee on a business trip. The implication was that every Googler should converse at the level of Jared Diamond or the ghost of Alan Turing. The idea was to create a charged intellectual atmosphere that makes people want to come to work. It was something that Joe Kraus realized six months after he arrived, when he took a mental survey and couldn’t name a single dumb person he’d met at Google. “There were no bozos,” he says. “In a company this size? That was awesome.”
Google’s hiring practices became legendary for their stringency. Google’s first head of research, Peter Norvig, once called Google’s approach the “Lake Wobegon Strategy,” which he defined as “only hiring candidates who are above the mean of your current employees.”
The basic requirements were sky-high intelligence and unquenchable ambition. A more elusive criterion was one’s Googliness. This became explicit one day when Google was only a four-person company, still in Wojcicki’s house, interviewing a prospective fifth. “It was someone we knew from Stanford who we knew was a smart guy,” says Craig Silverstein. Maybe not that smart—he spent the entire interview lecturing the young founders on the mistakes they were making and the opportunity that they had, if they were sharp enough to hire him, to have someone in place to fix all those mistakes. “We really needed to hire people at that point,” says Silverstein. But not at the expense of the culture. After the candidate left, Silverstein noted the obvious: this guy is not one of us. “Everyone understood that early employees set the tone for the company,” he says.
The Googliness factor was something that Carrie Farrell learned about when she became one of the company’s first engineering recruiters. She joined the company in 2001 and quickly understood that Page and Brin intended to make Google an exalted destination for the computer science elite. “We would have a list of the hundred best engineers around the world, and we basically had to call them and get them in,” she says. But it wasn’t only brilliance that would get a candidate a job at Google. When Farrell went to her first meeting of the hiring council (the group that vetted prospective employees), she assumed that she would present her case and, after a brief discussion, the council would accept her recommendation. Instead, she discovered a group determined not to permit unworthies to pass through the portals of geek heaven. Brin, Jeff Dean, Georges Harik, and other engineers began a tough analysis of the candidate, as if Farrell were peripheral to the discussion. Feeling she should be making a pitch for the candidate, Farrell pointed out her guy’s credentials and coding acumen. They shut her down, saying that all that stuff was in the package. Then, after more heated conversation, they turned back to Farrell and began pelting her with questions: When he talked to the interviewers, what was he like? Good eye contact? Did he seem like a nice guy? Did he seem like someone you’d want to sit next to? Farrell was dazed.
She came to realize that they were schooling her on how to determine who would fit into Google’s culture. One early employee called it “the Googliness screen.” While the engineers involved in the process would evaluate the test code the candidate had to produce, it was her job to determine whether the person was both creative and sufficiently thick-skinned to defend her stance on a technical or strategic issue. “This is a tough environment,” she says. “People need to know what they’re talking about and be able to defend themselves, to communicate what they’re thinking and feeling.” If a candidate was rude to the receptionist, that was a deal breaker.
But Google’s practices had a whiff of elitism as well. From the beginning, Google profiled people by which college they had attended. As Page said, “We hired people like us”—brainy strivers from privileged backgrounds who aced the SAT, brought home good grades, and wrote the essays that got them into the best schools. Google sought its employees from Stanford, Berkeley, University of Washington, MIT—the regulars. There were exceptions, but not enough to stop some Googlers from worrying that the workforce would take on an inbred aspect. “You’re going to get groupthink,” warned Doug Edwards, an early marketing hire. “Everybody’s going to have the same background, the same opinions. You need to mix it up.”
Even more controversial was Google’s insistence on relying on academic metrics for mature adults whose work experience would seem to make college admission test scores and GPAs moot. In her interview for Google’s top HR job, Stacy Sullivan, then age thirty-five, was shocked when Brin and Page asked for her SAT scores. At first she challenged the practice. “I don’t think you should ask something from when people were sixteen or seventeen years old,” she told them. But Page and Brin seemed to believe that Google needed those … data. They believed that SAT scores showed how smart you were. GPAs showed how hard you worked. The numbers told the story.
It never failed to astound midcareer people when Google asked to exhume those old records. “You’ve got to be kidding,” said R. J. Pittman, thirty-nine years old at the time, to the recruiter who asked him to produce his SAT scores and GPA. He was a Silicon Valley veteran, and Google had been wooing him. “I was pretty certain I didn’t have a copy of my SATs, and you can’t get them after five years or something,” he says. “And they’re, ‘Well, can you try to remember, make a close guess?’ I’m like, ‘Are you really serious?’ And they were serious. They will ask you questions about a grade that you got in a particular computer science class in college: Was there any reason why that wasn’t an A? And you think, ‘What was I doing way back then?’”
Google persisted in asking for that information even after its own evidence showed that the criteria weren’t relevant to how well people actually performed at Google. The company sometimes even reinvoked undergrad grades when determining the position of Googlers well after their hiring. “They know there’s no correlation between [performance and] where you went to school and your GPA, because we’ve done correlation studies,” says Sullivan. “But we still like to ask, because it is an important data point.”
Marissa Mayer was a defender of the practice. “A GPA is worth looking at, because it shows an element of diligence,” she says. “Can you meet deadlines, do you have good follow-through? We know that good students will get their work done on time, they’ll get their presentations done, they’ll get their code done right.” A score over 3.5 generally puts you in the clear; between 3.0 and 3.5 generated some concern in Google’s hiring teams. Anything less was serious trouble. And even if your professional résumé shone, a lack of a degree at all was a major handicap. Another midcareer hire, Devin Ivester, who had been a creative director at Apple, thought his hiring was on track when he got a call from his recruiter saying that Google really liked him but there were some blanks in his application—specifically, his college graduation date. “I never graduated,” he said. “I started a business.” “That’s going to be a problem,” she said. That hurdle was overcome only because he had gotten the highest recommendation from an early Googler.
But Ivester’s experience showed that Google could accommodate exceptions to its standards. Just as in the case of elite institutions, the stray C or a non-Mensa SAT score could be trumped by an accomplishment that indicated that one was special. “It’s like they did some crazy skiing thing or could do the Rubik’s cube better than anybody,” says early employee Megan Smith. Stacy Sullivan could recall having trouble hiring someone in international sales—until she noted that his résumé cited a foosball championship in Italy. “That’s pretty good,” said Sergey. “We can hire him.” If the guy worked that hard at something, the logic went, he’d probably be pretty good at selling ads. And if you were stuck at the airport with him, you’d have the best foosball conversation ever.
Tales of the stringent Google hiring process gave rise to an entire genre of web literature, generally mini-memoirs about how the author had navigated (and, more often than not, failed at) Google’s arcane hiring obstacle course. Generally, even those with dashed hopes expressed gratitude at a lesson well learned and a great meal at Charlie’s Café.
As years went by, the company streamlined the process. After a period when candidates would go through a series of as many as twenty interviews, Google whittled down the number. Even though the company’s metrics determined that after four interviews the returns diminished, candidates often had closer to eight. “It used to take forever—anywhere between six and twelve months—to get hired by Google. Now it takes, on average, something like forty-six to sixty days from start to finish,” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s director of People Operations. (He describes his role as “HR with math.”) If a hiring council wanted to go beyond eight interviews, it had to seek Bock’s approval.
Still, even in its short form, landing a job at Google put you through a process that made a Harvard application look easy. The interviews, loaded with brainteasers that would challenge Gauss and computer-coding versions of Jeopardy, were only the first stage. The recruiters would comb the data, and, if they were high on the candidate, they compiled a detailed packet including all the interview feedback, academics, references, and so on. It could run twenty to forty pages. Then the application went to a hiring council made up of people with some expertise in the area—but not those who would directly manage the new employee. Otherwise, the temptation would be too great to give an offer to a substandard employee because “every manager wants some help rather than no help,” says Peter Norvig. The council then did its own analysis. “We read through about eight pieces of feedback—each is more than a page—that discuss analytical ability, overall intelligence, technical skills, cultural fit, résumé, and sort of an overall summary piece,” says Marissa Mayer. If the council gave thumbs up, an executive management group reexamined the packet to make the penultimate call.
The last word always went to Larry Page, who insisted on signing off on every employee hired at Google. For every hire, he was given a compressed version of the packet, generated by custom-made software that allowed Page to quickly see the salient data but also empowered him to probe into the gritty details should he choose. “It’s sort of a nested electronic index of everything,” he says. Page would get a set every week and usually returned them with his approvals—or in some cases bounces—in three or four days.
Page didn’t think it unusual or a control-freak quirk that his personal seal was required for every hire. “It helps me to know what’s really going on,” he says. “I can get a pretty good feel for that in a short amount of time. I occasionally do a spot check, to ask what is the real quality of person we’re hiring.” On the day he spoke about this, in early 2010, he cited his most recent session, a few days earlier. “It only took me about fifteen to twenty minutes to do, and we hired probably over a hundred people.”
It was Bill Campbell’s idea to gather a few key Googlers together and hammer out a set of the young company’s corporate values. He had no idea that it would be the source of a motto that would become a controversial self-definition of the company—a combination guiding light and curse.
Campbell was a Silicon Valley legend: if movers and shakers there were assigned human PageRanks according to important links, he’d be a rare 10. A former football coach at Columbia who had run Apple’s software company in the 1980s, Campbell was the chairman of the software company Intuit. He was also best friends with Steve Jobs; in the Valley that was like being “1” on God’s speed dialer. In early 2001, John Doerr had brought him into Google for an unofficial but critical role as an executive coach. A burly, profane straight shooter who mixed his macho with bearlike hugs and verbal wet kisses, Campbell improbably connected not only with Brin but with the not-so-huggy Page. Even more than Eric Schmidt, he became the father figure in Google’s corporate family and was instrumental in easing the tensions in Schmidt’s bumpy process of establishing his role in Google’s ruling troika.
Brin and Page’s idealistic views of a corporate culture impressed Campbell, but he worried that as the company grew, those values would be diluted, misinterpreted, or ignored as more layers wedged between the founders and a workforce of thousands. At Intuit, a group of employees had compiled a set of corporate values that could be shared both inside and outside the company. Campbell convinced the executives at Google that they should do something similar.
On July 19, 2001, Stacy Sullivan, who had come to Google to run human resources, pulled together a group for that purpose. They gathered in Charlie’s, about fifteen of them from various parts of the company, including David Krane from communications, Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel from engineering, and Joan Braddi, VP of search services. Marissa Mayer was there, as was Salar Kamangar. And Campbell. Page and Brin were not in attendance. Charlie made smoothies. It was an unusual meeting.
Sullivan explained the format. People would identify Google’s values, and she would write down the good ones with a marker on a giant pad she’d set up on an easel. Some of them were straight from the conventional playbooks of management and self-realization, such as “Play hard but keep the puck down.” That was a riff on the twice-weekly roller hockey games that the Googlers played in the parking lot—since no one wore padding, there were frequent reminders not to emasculate anyone with a hard rubber disk. (Minor injuries were nonetheless common.) Another one stipulated, “Google will strive to honor all its commitments.”
As Sullivan scrawled these nostrums on the big pad, Paul Buchheit was thinking, This is lame. Jawboning about citizenship and values seemed like the kind of thing you do at a big company. He’d seen enough of that at his previous job at Intel. At one point the chipmaker had given employees little cards with a list of values you could attach to your badge. If something objectionable came up you were to look at your little corporate values card and say, “This violates value number five.” Lame. “That whole thing rubbed me the wrong way,” Buchheit later recalled. “So I suggested something that would make people feel uncomfortable but also be interesting. It popped into my mind that ‘Don’t be evil’ would be a catchy and interesting statement. And people laughed. But I said, ‘No, really.’”
The slogan made Stacy Sullivan uncomfortable. It was so negative. “Can’t we phrase it as ‘Do the right thing’ or something more positive?” she asked. Marissa and Salar agreed with her. But the geeks—Buchheit and Patel—wouldn’t budge. “Don’t be evil” pretty much said it all, as far as they were concerned. They fought off every attempt to drop it from the list.
“They liked it the way it was,” Sullivan would later say with a sigh. “It was very important to engineering that they were not going to be like Microsoft, they were not going to be an evil company.”
When the meeting ended, “Don’t be evil” was just one of a number of broad statements on an otherwise timid list of values. But Amit Patel felt that when it came to corporate values, that phrase really said it all; follow that commandment, and the rest should flow. Patel, remember, was one of Google’s first engineers. He had been an early keeper of the logs and had focused on the way they could be used to demonstrate Google’s value as a barometer of public interest. Now he had a new crusade. He would imprint the phrase into Google’s corporate subconscious. Making use of the whiteboards that were ubiquitous in the hallways and conference rooms in the Googleplex, he scrawled the phrase over and over in his distinct calligraphic style, a sans-serif, Tolkien-esque script. Amit Patel became Google’s Kilroy.
“He wrote everywhere he could,” says David Krane. “It became this atmospheric, pervasive reminder.”
“It was just an informal sort of reminder that we’re all here to do the right thing,” says Cindy McCaffrey, head of PR at the time. “Everybody felt good about it, especially the engineers. It meant, ‘Look, out in the world, there are all kinds of companies doing evil things and we have an opportunity here to always do the right thing.’”
It had a powerful effect within the company. Even in the kingdom of data, there was one thing that you could go on by gut: what was evil and what was not. The concept could impinge on your consciousness in small ways. You might be in a microkitchen eyeing someone else’s leftovers in the fridge and then see the little note saying “Don’t be evil.” And, says David Krane, “You realize, it can mean, ‘Don’t take someone’s food that looks appealing.’” But it also applied to much bigger things, like maintaining a stiff line between advertising and search results, or protecting a user’s personal information, or—much later—resisting the oppressive measures of the Chinese government.
For months, “Don’t be evil” was like a secret handshake among Googlers. An idea would come up in a meeting with a whiff of anticompetitiveness to it, and someone would remark that it sounded … evil. End of idea. “Don’t be evil” was a shortcut to remind everyone that Google was better than other companies. Since the slogan was internal, no outsiders were talking about it. But then Eric Schmidt revealed Google’s internal motto to a reporter from Wired. To McCaffrey, that was the moment when “Don’t be evil” got out of control and became a hammer to clobber Google’s every move. “We lost it, and I could never grasp it back,” she says. “Everybody would’ve been happy if it could’ve been this sort of silent code or little undercurrent that we secretly harbored instead of this thing that set us up for a lot of ridiculous criticism.” Elliot Schrage, who was in charge of communications and policy for Google from 2005 to 2008, concluded that “Don’t be evil” might originally have benefited the company but became “a millstone around my neck” as Google’s growth took it to controversial regions of the world.
Nonetheless, most people at Google continued to take pride in being associated with that risky admonition. “It’s easy to take a cheap shot at them with that as a motto,” says John Doerr. “But I think it’s served them well.” Doerr believes that the meme is so deeply implanted in the Google ethos because the rule became internalized. You wouldn’t hear it much in the boardroom, he says, because “it doesn’t need to be said—it’s implicit.”
Alan Eustace, Google’s director of engineering, believed that the motto simply reflected what’s in the souls of Googlers: “I look at people here as missionaries—not mercenaries,” he says.
In any case, the founders themselves embraced “Don’t be evil” as a summation of their own hopes for the company. That was what Google was about: two young men who wanted to do good, gravitated to a new phenomenon (the Internet) that promised to be a history-making force for good, developed a solution that would gather the world’s information, level the Tower of Babel, and link millions of processors into a global prosthesis for knowledge. And if the technology they created would make the world a better place, so would their company; Google would be a shining beacon for the way corporations should operate: an employee-centric, data-driven leadership pampering a stunningly bright workforce that, for its own part, lavished all its wit and wizardry on empowering users and enriching advertising customers. From those practices, the profits would roll in. Ill intentions, flimflammery, and greed had no role in the process. If temptation sounded its siren call, one could remain on the straight path by invoking Amit Patel’s florid calligraphy on the whiteboards of the Googleplex: “Don’t be evil.” Page and Brin were good, and so must be the entity they founded.
Which explains why Larry Page and Sergey Brin made the expression into the centerpiece of the initial public offering that transformed Google from a clever Internet start-up into a corporate phenomenon.
Neither Page nor Brin wanted to go public. The idea of hewing to the complicated reporting protocols of a public corporation was anathema to the secretive Page. And during the time when going public became a virtual imperative—in early 2004—the “hiding strategy” was still in effect. Talking to a reporter at that time, Page and Brin insisted that an IPO was not a foregone conclusion. “I think there’s always the opportunity to screw it up, be it private or public,” Brin said. “Perhaps I’m naïve, but I think that we could maintain Google being private or public.”
But by that point, going public was inevitable. The previous year, Google had begun its path toward the public offering that was destined to be a Silicon Valley milestone. The venture capitalists, as one would expect, were forceful advocates; selling stock on the marketplace was their means of realizing the huge payback their investment had reaped on paper. And Page and Brin’s arguments against the move had become progressively weaker. The attractions of remaining private were stealth and control. But regulations required a company with more than five hundred shareholders to reveal financial information anyway. In 2004, Google crossed that line. In any case, many of Google’s employees deserved the opportunity to convert some of their own options to cash. It was almost sadistic to deny them.
Google would go public. But Larry and Sergey would do it their way. The process played out as a slow-motion conflict. It was the values of Google squaring off against the values of Wall Street, which embodied everything its founders despised about tradition-bound, irrational corporate America.
The first order of business was making sure that outside shareholders (who almost by definition would not be as smart as Googlers) would never be able to overrule LSE’s decisions. Their model was Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which was the most prominent example of the dual class ownership structure. In Google’s case, ordinary investors would buy class A stock, which counted as one vote per share. Class B stock, restricted to founders, directors, and owners, would have a weight of ten votes a share. The vast majority of class B stock was owned by Page, Brin, and Schmidt. This way Brin and Page could maintain control even if their combined shares fell well short of 50 percent of the total.
Google warned investors that it intended to ignore short-term gains in favor of enduring value. Google also said that the information it provided every quarter would adhere to the minimum required by the law and generally be much less than other companies provided. In short, if you bought Google, you were taking a flier on its leaders. These specifications did not please VCs John Doerr and Mike Moritz—in theory, they would make shares less valuable to investors—but they accepted them. Even with those restrictions, Google’s IPO would easily reap over a billion-dollar profit for each VC’s fund.
Brin and Page decided that the IPO would be conducted by auction. Their impulses were both egalitarian and financial. In a typical IPO, the opening price is set much lower than the market would dictate. Opportunities to buy shares are available only to insiders—people connected to the investment banks organizing the offering or the company itself. Within hours the shares reach their true market price, often many times what the insiders paid for them. (When Netscape had gone public in 1995, shares had opened at $28 and been priced at $75 by the end of day.) That was unfair to the general public but also penalized the company, which wound up receiving less than the true value of its shares. In theory, an auction would eliminate those problems. The concept had been used previously, but never for a public offering the size of Google’s, which would certainly sell over a billion dollars’ worth of stock.
Eric Schmidt later said the tipping point for this decision was a letter “from a little old lady” who was griping in advance that whenever she tried to invest in an IPO, stockbrokers would get there first and she’d be shut out. But the real lure was the math of it. Logically, it seemed to be a better approach, and that meant a lot at a data-driven operation like Google. “We’re an auction company—we’re going to run an auction,” Schmidt would later say, as if it were no big deal.
In 2003, Google started hiring people whose skill set was geared toward guiding a company through the IPO process. One was Lise Buyer, a former investment banker who’d moved to the world of Silicon Valley venture capital. She worked with Google’s chief finance officer, George Reyes.
In early 2004, Google began contacting investment banks. The company felt it had the leverage to make sure that the ones involved would be on its wavelength. It began by limiting the field to investment banks that had sent it queries about an IPO before October 20, 2003. Those banks each received a solicitation asking for detailed answers to twenty questions on how they would handle the offering. It was Google’s equivalent of the show-your-stuff essay that prospective students file with a college. Some bankers were offended at having to explain themselves and immediately got on the phone to try to talk their way out of committing themselves on paper. No waivers were granted.
Hypersensitive about leaks, Google worded each letter to a bank slightly differently, so that it could later identify which banks couldn’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut. “It did not stop the leaks, but we were quite comfortable we knew where they came from,” says Buyer, who added that Google cut the indiscreet parties out of the offering.
Typically, a bank would bring its heavy hitter—often its celebrity CEO—to the pitch meeting. Google demanded that it meet only with the bankers who would actually be handling the offering. The request was so unusual that some banks refused to believe it. “Goldman Sachs, Citi—pretty much all of them—said, ‘Okay, we’re going to fly in and bring Hank Paulson, we’re going to bring Bob Rubin,’” says Lise Buyer. “And I’d say, ‘I’m sure he’s a great guy, but he’s not going to do our deal—save us the time.’” Eventually, most of the banks got the message, but when Citibank showed up, there was its celebrated leader, Robert Rubin. “To be fair,” says Buyer, “he didn’t do the usual CEO grandstanding.”
Credit Suisse, which had done a great job on the questionnaire, was a dark horse that became the co–lead bank, along with Morgan Stanley, which, as Google’s team had expected, diligently answered the questions. Even though Hambrecht was known as the pioneer of the auction-based IPO, it was Morgan Stanley that developed the technology to run the Dutch auction that would determine opening prices.
Google wasn’t the easiest client. For one thing, it specified that the fees it would pay would be 2.8 percent of the sale, about half the accustomed rate. (That sent Merrill Lynch running—no way it would allow Google to set that precedent.) There were also the complications of the auction, which would take much more time and attention than the normal IPO. And finally, there was the fact that this was Google, led by two Montessori maniacs who felt compelled to question traditional methods in every way.
Instances of Google’s idiosyncrasies persisted throughout the process, beginning with the total value of shares originally to be offered: $2,718,281,828. Only the geekiest investor would understand that this was a mathematical joke, as those were the first nine decimal places in the irrational number e, known as Napier’s constant. More striking was the prospectus. Normally such a document, known as the S-1, was a fairly dry packet that laid out financials, cited risk factors, and gave a straightforward but controversy-free account of what the company was all about. Since SEC regulations were specific, the document usually read as if it had been written by financiers and vetted down to the last dependent clause by lawyers—because it was.
Page and Brin instead drafted a personal letter to potential investors explaining in simple language why Google was special and therefore would have a different relationship with its shareholders than other companies did. It was in the spirit of the famous essays by Warren Buffett in Berkshire Hathaway’s reports, as well as the “Owner’s Manual” supplied by Buffett to his shareholders. Buffett’s dispatches were distinguished by a homespun clarity and a core belief in a nourishing, steady-as-she-goes approach to the fundamentals of business. “We wanted to get people to know what to expect,” says Brin. Brin and Page were so wed to an intimate missive, as opposed to committee-created documents, that they decided that the letter would be written mainly by one person, with the two founders alternating each year. The initial edition would be Larry Page’s message.
“Google is not a conventional company,” began Page’s letter, released on April 29, 2004. “We do not intend to become one.” It was an explicit warning to potential shareholders: fasten your seat belts!
In his “Owner’s Manual to Google,” Page put front and center the unofficial motto of Google, “Don’t be evil.” “We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place,” he wrote. “We believe strongly that in the long term we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and broadly shared within the company.”
The “Don’t be evil” passage generated anxiety within Google’s IPO team. “It was very clear that cynical Wall Street was going to rake them over the coals,” says Lise Buyer. But once Buyer got past the weirdness of it, she came to agree with Page’s approach. “What that letter did more than anything was, it really told people how the company thinks and operates,” she says. Even five years later, Google CFO Patrick Pichette would tell potential shareholders, “Read the founder letter, and if you’re comfortable, buy stock.”
But when Google’s S-1 appeared, the first-day news wasn’t Larry’s letter but the spectacular financial results that followed. “The day the prospectus was available to the public, it was ‘Holy shit, somebody cracked the code of the age-old unsolved problem of the Internet,’” says David Krane. Newsrooms around the country began to deploy journalists to get to know this suddenly important force in global business. Google rebuffed the deluge of requests from journalists seeking context and color. It was the beginning of the quiet period mandated by the SEC.
Cindy McCaffrey was almost sick with frustration. She thought that the quiet period was some outdated artifact from the 1930s, when people barely had telephones and information dropped to outsiders was unlikely to spread. “Not being able to respond bred a permanent pattern of inaccuracy in Google coverage,” says David Krane, years after the fact. “We’re still digging out of that hole to some degree. And it had a tremendous impact on our founders and even our CEO on how they look at journalism and look at media.”
Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission was unimpressed by the charms of Page’s “Owner’s Manual.” “Please revise or delete the statements about providing ‘a great service to the world,’ ‘to do things that matter,’ ‘greater positive impact on the world, don’t be evil’ and ‘making the world a better place,’” they wrote. (Google would not revise the letter.) The commission also had a problem with Page’s description of the lawsuit that Overture (by then owned by Yahoo) had filed against Google as “without merit.” Eventually, to resolve this issue before the IPO date, Google would settle the lawsuit by paying Yahoo 2.7 million shares, at an estimated value of between $260 and $290 million.
That set a contentious tone that ran through the entire process. The SEC cited Google’s irregularities on a frequent basis, whether it was a failure to properly register employee stock options, inadequate reporting of financial results to stakeholders, or the use of only first names of employees in official documents. It acted toward Google like a junior high school vice principal who’d identified an unruly kid as a bad seed, requiring constant detentions.
From Wall Street, investment Brahmins waged a back-channel attack on Google’s prospects. Their apparent intention was to drive down the price of the opening bid for the stock. Financial journalists—still feeling sheepish for having overplayed Internet companies during the late 1990s bubble—took the bait and filed innumerable stories expressing skepticism about the latest web darling. Google never figured out an effective way to respond.
An integral part of a public offering is a “road show,” during which company leaders pitch their prospects to bankers and investment gurus. Brin and Page refused to see themselves as supplicants. According to Lise Buyer, the founders routinely spurned any advice from the experienced financial team they’d hired to guide them through the process. “If you told them you couldn’t do something a certain way, they would think you were an idiot,” she says.
The tone of the road-show presentations was set early, as Brin and Page introduced themselves by first names, an opening more appropriate for bistro waiters than potential captains of industry. And of course they weren’t attired like executives—the day of their presentation of Google’s case to investors was one more in a lifetime of casual dress days for them. Google had prepared a video to promote the company, but viewers considered it amateurish. It was poorly lit and wasn’t even enlivened by the customary upbeat musical sound track. Though anyone who read the prospectus should have been prepared for that, some investors had difficulty with the heresy that Google was willing to forgo some profits for its founders’ idealistic views of what made the world a better place. On the video Brin cautioned that Google might apply its resources “to ameliorate a number of the world’s problems.”
Probably the low point of the road show was a massive session involving 1,500 potential investors at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Brin and Page caused a firestorm by refusing to answer many questions, cracking jokes instead. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Some investors sitting in the ballroom began speculating with each other whether the executives had spent any time practicing the presentation, or if they were winging it.” The latter was in fact the case—despite the desperate urging of Google’s IPO team, Page and Brin had refused to perform even a cursory run-through. Things went better on home turf a week later, at a presentation before a hundred Silicon Valley investors at San Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel. The best sessions of all were smaller meetings where a single member of the triumvirate would present. Lise Buyer accompanied Sergey on one of those trips and thought he was brilliant, connecting with investors one-on-one as he explained the way Google’s business worked.
But that was a rare moment of connection in a process hampered by investors’ failure to understand Google’s unusual business model. Despite Google’s release of its financials, Wall Street seemed to have no idea how the company really operated and what plans it had for the future. “We were asked on the road show why we were spending so much in capital,” says Schmidt. “And Larry and Sergey looked at each other as if to say ‘They don’t know yet!’” Had the founders been candid, they would have explained that the capital was being spent on engineering talent, fiber-optic cables, and data centers, creating a nearly insurmountable advantage over their competitors. But they kept that to themselves, even at the expense of failing to persuade investors to buy the IPO.
As the auction date approached, an accumulation of further missteps hounded Google. Some of them involved the auction process. Google had spent a lot of time working out the details, using a team that included its chief economist, Hal Varian, and experts from academia. The company had come up with a way to implement a Dutch auction, in which the final bid—the amount paid by all winners—would be the lowest bid that would raise the required amount of money to buy the offered shares. Meanwhile, Page pushed for a test that prospective investors would be required to pass: answer three questions about Google, just to make sure that you understand the company and aren’t just making a trendy bid. It was the closest he could come to demanding potential investors’ SAT scores. The SEC nixed the idea.
Google had considerable experience with pleasing users, but in the case of the auction, it could not create a simple interface. SEC rules demanded complexity. So the Google auction was a lot more complicated than buying Pokémon cards on eBay. People had to qualify financially as bidders. Bids had to be placed by a brokerage. If you made an error in registering, you could not correct it but had to reregister. All those problems led to a few postponements of the start of the bidding period.
But the deeper problem was the uncertainty of Google’s prospects. As the press accounts accumulated—with reporters informed by Wall Streeters eager to sabotage the process—the perception grew that Google was a company with an unfamiliar business model run by weird people. A typical Wall Street insider analysis was reflected by Forbes.com columnist Scott Reeves, who concluded that Google’s target price, at the time pegged to the range between $108 and $135 a share, was excessive. “Only those who were dropped on their head at birth [will] plunk down that kind of cash for an IPO,” Reeves wrote.
On August 12, just as the bidding process was about to begin, Cindy McCaffrey took a call from a reporter asking about a press release he had just received from Playboy magazine, whose September issue was just about to hit the stands. It featured a long interview with “The Google Guys.”
McCaffrey knew that Playboy had done an interview with Brin and Page before the quiet period began. Google’s PR people had been eager for exposure beyond the usual tech magazines and publications with weighty business sections, and had convinced Page and Brin to cooperate with Playboy. On April 22, the writer, David Sheff, had gone to the Googleplex for the first of what he believed would be several sessions. He’d seen this first interview as an icebreaker and held off on some of the more personal or critical matters that he planned to bring up when he’d established a rapport. He’d assumed he would return in a few days for more interviews and a photo session. But when Sheff called Google soon after his visit, he got nothing but evasion. A week later, Google filed its prospectus, and the quiet period officially began. Google told Sheff that if he wanted more time with Larry and Sergey, he’d have to wait until after the IPO was completed. McCaffrey assumed that the project was on hold. In any case, Larry and Sergey didn’t want to sit down again with Playboy. The interview had been pleasant enough, but they felt that a single session had dispatched their obligation.
Sheff’s editor, Stephen Randall, thought that the idea of more sessions was moot. “We had an opportunity to be more newsworthy because of the IPO,” he says. “So I decided to crash it through, even though we only had a partial interview.” Playboy thus had the Google Guys interview no one else could get. “It was a very, very big day for us,” says Randall. “You couldn’t have asked for anything better.”
For Google, though, it was a disaster. Even Google’s finance team was stunned. Out of nowhere a photocopy of the issue appeared—the cover story promised “The Women of the Olympics—12 Pages of Spectacular Nudes”—and was being passed around like a social disease. “It made us look like idiots,” says Lise Buyer. Google had to contact the SEC to clarify what seemed like a violation of its rules. For a while it looked as though the entire IPO was in jeopardy. Google came up with a compromise that defused the situation: it included the entire Playboy interview as an amendment to the S-1. Still, it was yet another indication that these people asking shareholders for billions of dollars looked like a bunch of idiot savant kindergartners. “It has no bearing on my plans to bid in the auction,” one banker told The Wall Street Journal. “But it’s certainly consistent with the lack of adult supervision that seems to go on there.”
All the fumbles, postponements, and adjustments took their toll. Articles from that summer had headlines like “Whiz Kids’ Blunders Blacken IPO’s Eyes,” “Google’s Way May Not Be the SEC’s Way,” and one that summed it all up, “How Miscalculation and Hubris Hobbled Celebrated Google IPO.” It became obvious that the targets Google had set for the auction would not be met. Brin and Page cut in half the number of shares they planned to sell. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia announced that they wouldn’t sell any of their shares. (They feared the IPO price would be lower than what their shares would fetch on the open market later on.) And the projected price range for winning bids fell from the range of $108 to $135 per share to an estimated $85 to $95. Essentially Google’s projected value fell by about 30 percent, to $25.8 billion.
Google stumbled to the finish line on August 19. When the computers calculated the explicit bids, it was determined that the opening price would be $85—every bidder who submitted that price or more would be allocated shares at that sum. It was much higher than the opening price of a typical IPO but less than Google had hoped for.
Sergey stayed in Mountain View that day. “I was tired and didn’t want to take the red-eye,” he later explained. Instead, he did some code reviews. “This is a great opportunity to make a lot of decisions without Larry or Eric to disagree,” he joked to his colleagues at the Googleplex. Charlie Ayers served ice cream in Building 40 all day. In New York City, Larry Page, wearing a suit purchased at Macy’s, rang the opening bell at NASDAQ with Eric Schmidt, then went to Morgan Stanley to see how the stock would move. It finished the day at $100, quieting the doubters—somewhat. The Wall Street Journal’s headline was “Google Shares Prove Big Winners—For a Day.” (In fact, Google stock would never be that low again.) Page and Brin each ended the day worth $3.8 billion.
Those people dropped on their heads at birth who were dumb enough to bid more than $100 for the shares did pretty well. The shares they purchased for $85 realized an 18 percent profit in a single day. Though Wall Street had gotten its licks in, Google could claim success insofar as the auction process gave equal access to all investors. None of that mattered in the ensuing months and years as the stock took off. The stock price climbed to $280 a year later, $383 a year after that, and a little more than three years after the IPO, topped $700.
The Monday after the IPO, Schmidt hosted a postmortem at the weekly executive meeting. “Everybody yelled and screamed for a while,” he says. After all the venting, Schmidt turned to Omid Kordestani for his comment. In 1999, Kordestani had spurned other opportunities to join two brash Stanford kids, and now he was unfathomably rich. Maybe a more successful IPO would have made him a little richer at that very moment, but now his financial fate depended on what happened to the share price, not the opening bid. His response played on a convention of the Olympics, currently under way in Athens.
“I would like to declare the closing of the IPO,” he said.
Schmidt was delighted. “I hereby declare the IPO is over,” he said.
The Playboy interview, the SEC, the sniping from Wall Street—none of it mattered now.
The sudden enrichment of Google’s workforce presented a serious threat to a culture that aspired to a certain public humility. (Matt Cutts expressed the unspoken code this way: “I like to drive fast, so I don’t have any Google-related stuff on my car. I don’t want to cut someone off and as I go zooming off have someone say, ‘What a jerk! Oh, he’s a Googler!’”) Its executives took some steps to stem the toxic behavior seen during the recent tech bubble, where newly coined millionaires paid more attention to lucre than product development. In the Googleplex, one’s personal wealth could now be constantly monitored on the same computer screens that engaged everyone’s attention at every moment. On the day of the IPO, Wayne Rosing, the head of engineering, addressed an all-hands meeting. In his hand he held a baseball bat. He told the Googlers that if he looked in the parking lot in the next few days and saw new BMWs or Porsches, he would use the bat to smash the windshields.
Marissa Mayer told her team that she didn’t want them checking the stock price during the day. When her workers did not respond with full compliance, she instituted another policy: if anyone who worked for her spotted someone else in the group looking at the stock ticker, all he or she had to do was walk over and tap that person on the shoulder. Then that person would have to buy you a share of stock. After a number of involuntary exchanges, people either stopped checking or learned to hide their peeking more effectively.
But Googlers were affected by stock ownership. (They were, after all, human.) Bo Cowgill, a Google statistician, did a series of studies of his colleagues’ behavior, based on their participation in a “prediction market,” a setup that allowed them to make bets on the success of internal projects. He discovered that “daily stock price movements affect the mood, effort level and decision-making of employees.” As you’d expect, increases in stock performance made people happier and more optimistic—but they also led them to regard innovative ideas more warily, indicating that as Googlers became richer, they became more conservative. That was exactly the downside of the IPO that the founders had dreaded.
Regulations stipulated that Google employees could not sell stock for ninety days after the August IPO. By that time, the stock price had risen to $175 a share. During a press interview at the Googleplex that November day, Eric Schmidt did his best to convey that Googlers were going to remain the same down-to-earth geeks they always were. “Somehow there’s this assumption that the people at Google made money and are going to retire on their boats,” he said. “These people don’t sail. Some of them do need to buy a house—they’ve been living in itty-bitty apartments.” He turned to David Krane, a onetime English major who was now a tech millionaire. “Do you sail a lot?” he asked.
“I don’t sail,” said Krane.
“You see what I’m saying?” said Schmidt. “Look around—everybody’s here!”
Indeed, that day the people at Google were improving search quality, selling ads, and figuring out how to work the espresso machine—not sailing. Six years after the IPO, an impressive number of Google’s most important early employees—executives such as Susan Wojcicki and Salar Kamangar and core engineers such as Amit Singhal, Ben Gomes, and Jeff Dean—were still working hard at Google, even though they had the wealth of Saudi princes.
Still, that personal wealth would inevitably change the lifestyles of early Googlers. How could it not?
Not long after the IPO, Marissa Mayer shared a recent revelation with a reporter. Previously if she were in a department store and there was a pair of slacks that cost a hundred dollars, she would ask herself whether or not she should buy the slacks. Now she would just buy them. Mayer would later purchase a house in Palo Alto in addition to a penthouse suite in the San Francisco Four Seasons Hotel, and Oscar de la Renta would tell Vogue that Mayer was “one of his biggest customers.” If you spent time with other early Googlers, it would sometimes slip out that they owned lavish homes in posh Atherton, California, vacation retreats in Hawaii, pied-à-terre brownstones in New York City, and other indications of brimming bank accounts. Eric Schmidt, who was already a tech magnate when he joined Google, owned several airplanes and a yacht. Larry Page would buy his own $60 million pleasure boat. (Not all Googlers eschewed sailing, it seems.) The key was keeping it on the down low. When someone failed to maintain that discipline, colleagues would note it.
Even the Google masseuse noticed the impact of money, especially when it came to the divide between early employees holding valuable options and those who came later. “While one was looking at local movie times on his monitor, the other was booking a flight to Belize for the weekend,” she said in a book she wrote. “Don’t think everyone wasn’t aware of the rift.”
Schmidt came to see the IPO as a necessary rite of passage for Google. “I don’t understand, and will never understand, some of the specific trade-offs that were made, and to be honest, we don’t need to. We were never going to do it the way anybody else did,” he said that November. Framed on the wall in the room where he spoke was a poster-sized certificate from Morgan Stanley congratulating Google on the sale of 22,534,678 shares of stock in its August 2004 initial public offering, at the opening price of $85 a share. On the glass covering the poster someone had stuck a yellow Post-it note saying, “SHOULD HAVE BEEN $135.”
Five years later, the Post-it note was still there.
By the time of its IPO, Google had grown to the size where a company usually sets aside its loose structures and adopts well-established management structures. But Google, in Page’s words, was “not a conventional company.” Page and Brin wanted it all: a company with thousands of engineers that ran smoothly while still indulging the creative impulses of its people. Every time the head count doubled, the question came up again: could Google’s bottom-up style of management actually scale? Page and Brin never doubted it. They envisioned an organizational map of Google as looking like a huge sheet covered with polka dots: small teams, flat organizations. The sheet would just get bigger, that was all.
Both Page and Brin believed that the company should run like the Internet itself: fast-moving, bottom up, going to work every day to make yesterday obsolete. “We were born in the Internet time,” says Megan Smith, “so our company’s like our products in some weird way.”
Google, however, had been through an early ordeal that showed that this flat-org ideal was unattainable. In 2001, Google had more than four hundred employees, reaching the point where it was impossible to pretend that it was an intimate company where everyone knew everyone else. Worse for Page and Brin, despite their best efforts, a layer of middle management was creeping in. Worse still, some of the newcomers were experienced product managers from companies such as Microsoft, whose training made them un-Googley—and those newcomers had difficulty adopting the often heretical approaches of the founders.
Brin and Page came up with a solution: Google would no longer have managers. At least not in engineering. Instead, they figured, the engineers could self-organize. That approach worked well in the nascent days of Google. If something needed fixing, people would figure out on their own what was wrong, and what was broken would be fixed. Other people would identify interesting problems in computing, and from those insights new products would arise. At the time Google had just hired Wayne Rosing to head engineering. Brin and Page figured that everyone could just report to him. The engineers would arrange themselves in pods of three, work on projects, and check in with Wayne.
That struck some of Google’s executives as madness. Stacy Sullivan, the head of HR, begged Page and Brin not to go through with it. “You can’t just self-organize!” she told them. “People need someone to go to when they have problems!”
The newly arrived Schmidt and the company’s unofficial executive coach, Bill Campbell, weren’t happy with the idea, either. Campbell would go back and forth with Page on the issue. “People don’t want to be managed,” Page would insist, and Campbell would say, “Yes, they do want to be managed.” One night Campbell stopped the verbal Ping-Pong and said, “Okay, let’s start calling people in and ask them.” It was about 8 P.M., and there were still plenty of engineers in the offices, pecking away at God knows what. One by one, Campbell and Page summoned them in, and one by one Page asked them, “Do you want to be managed?”
As Campbell would later recall, “Everyone said yeah.” Page wanted to know why. They told him they wanted somebody to learn from. When they disagreed with colleagues and discussions reached an impasse, they needed someone who could break the ties.
Nonetheless, Page and Brin were determined to go through with the plan. They called an all-hands meeting and announced it to a baffled workforce. For a few people it meant leaving the company. Others scrambled to find new roles. On the other hand, the move was welcomed by the engineers, who had been chafing at the creeping management restraints. For example, Eric Veach, who at the time was trying to invent the auction-based AdWords, later said that losing a manager had liberated him to make his breakthrough.
Ultimately, however, the plan petered out. After the initial turmoil, there was a quiet backslide where Google’s managerial class reassembled and regained a place in the structure. You just couldn’t have more than a hundred engineers reporting to Wayne Rosing. Google was taking on new engineers at a furious rate, and, brilliant as they were, the new people needed some guidance to figure out what to do. “I don’t remember Larry and Sergey saying that they were wrong and that we were right, but they agreed we could start to hire managers again, as long as the managers were good culture fits and technical enough and could be highly respected by the engineers,” says Sullivan.
Another organizational crisis at Google centered more specifically on product managers—the people who led the small teams of engineers. At Google, teams would typically have a tech lead (the smartest engineer) and a product manager. But it didn’t seem Googley to have lesser minds tell the brainiest engineers what to do. Unlike other tech companies, as late as 2001, Google didn’t have a top executive focusing on product management, and Schmidt kept suggesting candidates. Not convinced that the job should exist at all, Page and Brin kept rejecting them. Then Schmidt heard that Jonathan Rosenberg, a former executive at Excite@Home, had once impressed the founders during an interview for a VP of marketing job he’d turned down.
Schmidt begged Rosenberg to come in and talk. To get a sense of Rosenberg’s skills, he was asked to audition by delivering a test briefing. At one point in his canned presentation, Rosenberg stared at a spreadsheet calculation in his PowerPoint deck and corrected a subtle mathematical error. Everyone was blown away. (In fact, Rosenberg, knowing that Sergey Brin was supposed to be some sort of math Olympian, had planted the mistake and faked his spontaneous discovery.) Schmidt showed Rosenberg Google’s astounding financials, convincing Rosenberg that the job was the opportunity of a lifetime.
But his first year was awful. Larry Page would sit in meetings and second-guess every move Rosenberg made. “I would come to the staff meeting with my structured agenda, the market research we needed to do, the one- and two-year road maps that we needed to develop, and Larry would basically mock them and me,” Rosenberg later said.
For Rosenberg, whose leadership style was based on aggression and self-confidence, it was a crushing experience. Google’s executive shrink, Bill Campbell, suggested that Rosenberg ask Page what he thought Rosenberg should do. Page said that instead of working with schedules and plans, Rosenberg should just listen to the engineers. They were the ones with the ideas that mattered. After taking the advice to heart, Rosenberg finally got it: engineers rule. Page wasn’t out to get him—he and Brin were just adamant about not wanting product managers telling engineers what to do. He reevaluated his view of Page. Larry wasn’t ignorant of management processes; he was simply not an effective communicator. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that Rosenberg got the acknowledgment from Page he really sought. Page was showing his mother around Google one day, and he introduced her to Rosenberg. “What does he do?” she asked Larry. “Well, at first I wasn’t sure,” he told her. “But I’ve decided that now he’s the reason I sometimes have free time.”
Even as he sorted out his role, Rosenberg had another problem, a difficulty in getting product managers hired. His usual modus operandi was to go to places like Stanford and Harvard and bag the Baker Scholar or the R. J. Miller Scholar. But Page would meet such people and send them home jobless. “They would talk about paradigm shifts and competitive advantage and all that shit Larry wasn’t interested in,” Rosenberg says. “They weren’t technical.” It was Marissa Mayer who told him the obvious—Page wasn’t looking for project managers who were smart enough to understand engineers—he wanted them to be engineers.
Mayer suggested that Google look for computer science majors who saw themselves not just as engineers but as future CEOs. Her idea was to assemble a legion of “associate product managers.” Google would get them straight out of school, young people with no preconceptions derived from working elsewhere. Their careers would coevolve with Google. “We value insight over experience,” says Mayer. “We take people who we think have the right raw skills and insights and put them into roles with a lot of responsibility. And while that happens with APMs, it also happens all across the company. People here might not really be accomplished or have a long career before coming to Google, but they have the right data instincts about their area.”
It took months to find the first APM, a Stanford grad named Brian Rakowski. But what would he do? Mayer decided to put him in charge of launching an important product, a web-based email system. On Rakowski’s first day, she met him in the Ping-Pong conference room. “You’re going to be working on Gmail,” she said. Rakowski was speechless. “I was twenty-two years old,” he says. “I was shocked that they were going to let someone that young and inexperienced do that job.”
A lot was riding on Rakowski—if he flamed out, the program would be tarnished. The engineers on the project didn’t welcome a kid coming in as their PM. They asked Mayer if they could interview him first. She reminded them that he was already hired. The situation was defused a bit when the engineers checked out Rakowski’s web page. There was a picture of him taken after he’d had dental surgery, and his cheeks were puffed up like some sickly bunny’s. This was an indication that the kid had a certain wit and humility. But they still had to submit him to a technical gauntlet, just to make sure that his Stanford CS degree wasn’t just some anomaly. Even then, the job presented Herculean challenges. A product manager at Google didn’t give orders. His (or her) job was to charm the engineers into a certain way of thinking. It was a Mensa form of cat herding.
The way to do that, of course, was by hard numbers. Information was the great leveler at Google. “Because the APMs work with people who are so much more senior and more experienced, they don’t have the authority to say, ‘Because I said so.’ They need to gather the data, lobby the team, and win them over by data,” says Mayer. That process made the managerial weakness of the APM an asset for Google, by making sure that data was at the center of decision making. (Google further cemented this hierarchy by creating a position called UTL, or über tech lead—a wizard-level engineer on a bigger team who really calls the shots.) If an APM had an idea, he or she could order up a 1 percent A/B experiment (in which one out of a hundred users gets a version of the product with the suggested change), then go to the über tech lead and the team and say, “Users with this new experience are doing 11 percent more page views and clicking on ads 8 percent more.” With ammunition like that, a decision to include the new feature in the product wouldn’t be based on a power struggle but on a mathematical calculation. Nothing personal. It was data.
The APM program was a huge success. Google provided its young managers support in the form of regular meetings with Mayer and her staff and even regular sessions with executive coaches. Ultimately, the program helped Google maintain its team approach while still focusing on engineering as opposed to the kind of more elusive un-Googley skills that an MBA brings. (One might also note that Google, in its management practices and hiring preference for freethinkers, has achieved a complete turnaround from the ethic posed in William H. Whyte’s 1956 classic The Organization Man, which describes the perfect corporate employee as “obtrusive in no particular, excessive in no zeal”—the polar opposite of a Googler.)
Executives at Google were still worried about keeping the company’s teams lean. “Google still does try to keep things small and have teams that are really motivated, who feel they own the project,” says Urs Hölzle. But when a team begins to get too big, Google breaks the project into smaller pieces to keep the teams smaller—it refers to this practice as “load balancing,” as if its people were servers in a data center.
Another form of corporate load balancing assures that engineers’ dreams won’t mess with the bottom line. Around 2005, Google determined a simple formula to distribute its engineering talent: 70–20–10. Seventy percent of its engineers would work in either search or ads. Twenty percent would focus on key products such as applications. The remaining 10 percent would work on wild cards, which often emerged from the 20 percent time where people could choose their own projects. For all the talk about its other, well-publicized fraction—the 20 percent of free time that supposedly gestated Google’s big innovations—70–20–10 became Google’s magic allocation algorithm.
As the years passed and Google’s management system became formalized, a corporate amnesia seemed to envelop Brin and Page’s 2001 kill-the-managers caper. Ask Larry Page about it, and he professes only a vague memory. “We were two years old as a company,” he says. “You try different things, and we learned things that worked and things that didn’t.”
One thing that did seem to work was a management trick suggested by John Doerr, not long after the VC made his original $12.5 million investment in Google and joined its board. Doerr was a fan of a complicated system called Objectives and Key Results, usually referred to by the acronym OKR. It was something Andy Grove had devised at Intel (he’d called it Management by Objective), but Doerr believed it was even more useful for start-ups. “It’s really important in rapidly growing companies because it allows you to be superclear about what priorities are,” he says. His efforts to start OKRs at previous start-ups had met with mixed results, so he had no idea what reaction Larry and Sergey would have. But they were enthusiastic enough to have Doerr come and present it to the company.
So one day in 1999, Doerr took Googlers into a conference room and did a PowerPoint presentation on how OKRs worked. The idea was not just to identify what one wants to do but to break down the task into measurable bites (“key results”). In his book High Output Management, Grove imagined the OKR system applied to Christopher Columbus. The explorer fell short of his objective of finding a trade route to India, but he did carry out some subsidiary OKRs: he gathered a crew; he bought supplies; he avoided pirates; and by discovering the New World, he brought riches to Spain.
Doerr had Google at metrics. “Google did more than adopt it,” says Doerr. “They embraced it.”
OKRs became an essential component of Google culture. Every employee had to set, and then get approval for, quarterly OKRs and annual OKRs. There were OKRs at the team level, the department level, and even the company level. (Those last were used sparingly, for important initiatives or to address gaping failures.) Four times a year, everything stopped at Google for divisionwide meetings to assess OKR progress.
An outsider might have wondered if this were a sign of Dilbertization at Google, an annoying program that diverted energy from real work. But Googlers didn’t seem to think so. They saw the OKRs as data, a means of putting a number on the traditionally gooey means of assessing performance. It was essential that OKRs be measurable. An employee didn’t say, “I will make Gmail a success” but, “I will launch Gmail in September and have a million users by November.” “It’s not a key result unless it has a number,” says Marissa Mayer. The OKR embodied ambition. “It sanctions the ability to take risks,” says Doerr. Even worse than failing to make an OKR was exceeding the standard by a large measure; it implied that an employee had sandbagged it, played it safe, thought small. Google had no place for an audacity-challenged person whose grasp exceeded his reach.
The sweet spot was making about .7 or .8 of your OKR. (Geekily enough, the metric was measured by a decimal representation of how close an employee came to the OKR, with the integer 1 being an exact hit.) At the end of every quarter, employees set their OKRs for the next quarter, and six weeks later, they saw their managers and gave a progress report, using a traffic-light system for grading. “Green light, I’m good to go on that one. Red light, I’m having serious issues. Yellow, possible danger,” says McCaffrey. Toward the end of the quarter, all the OKRs were graded, and if an employee was hitting 100 percent, he or she needed something else to do.
What’s more, OKRs were not private benchmarks shared only with managers. They were public knowledge, as much a part of an employee’s Google identity as the job description. The OKRs appeared on every employee’s biographical information on MOMA, Google’s internal website. (The name didn’t stand for anything in particular—according to Marissa Mayer, Larry Page just wanted something fast and short and easy to type.) You could even see Larry and Sergey’s OKRs. “We needed to run our company somehow, and I think having an organizing principle makes sense,” says Brin. “We really like transparency and like the idea that we communicate to everybody on roughly one or two pages of paper every quarter what we want to accomplish.”
That kind of sharing was another hedge against the creeping impersonality endemic to big companies. At a start-up, everybody knows all their colleagues and what they are working on. Even as Google grew to more than 20,000 employees, it tried to maintain the ability to keep up with everyone else. In addition to MOMA, Googlers could access Project Database (PDB, as it was referred to at the Googleplex) to follow all the things the company was up to—engineering allocations, product manager allocations, product definitions, engineering documents, and specs. Also, Googlers looking for a cool new project could access a section called simply “Ideas,” where their colleagues pitched promising concepts that needed manpower.
The internal transparency was especially startling because Google had a phobia about leaks that rivaled that of the Nixon White House. The company was an information lobster, hard-shelled on the outside but soft and accessible on the inside. Sometimes employees didn’t get the distinction, as was the case with Mark Jen, a twenty-two-year-old Noogler who started a blog in 2005 called “ninetyninezeros” about his experiences; among the items that apparently displeased his bosses was a comparison of his salary and benefits to those at his previous employer (Microsoft), which paid more. He also noted that Google’s business was booming; even without his mentioning numbers, that was interpreted as data best withheld from competitors. Jen was fired before he completed a month at Google.
Google’s OKR system was only one of many processes, many imposed by Schmidt, intended to bring a sense of order to a company growing to 20,000 employees. “Google’s objective is to be the systematic innovator of scale. Innovator means new stuff. And scale means big, systematic ways of looking at things done in a way that’s reproducible,” Schmidt says. So Google spent a lot of effort on actual bureaucracy—a regular set of launch meetings and reviews, weekly meetings of the Operating Committee of the top leaders, global product strategy meetings, and a companywide peer review system that consumed enormous time.
“We try not to expose all those things,” Schmidt would joke about the organizational scaffolding, “because we want it to look chaotic.”
Perhaps the best illustration of Google’s creative denial of its Brobdingnagian size was a startling move that its founders made in 2007. For a number of years, Brin and Page drew organizational and clerical support from a pool of four sharp young women known as LSA, or Larry and Sergey Assistants. (Googlers referred to LSA as if it were a single organization. You would say, “I’ll check with LSA to see if Sergey can come to this meeting.”) The system seemed to work well, but Brin and Page felt constrained. By having assistants, they noticed, it was easier for people to ask things of them. “Most people aren’t willing to ask me if they want to meet with me,” says Page. “They’re happy to ask an assistant.” When a meeting request came, an LSA would have to see if Page or Brin actually wanted to do it. In truth, the founders almost never wanted to do it. So one day, Brin and Page abruptly dissolved LSA. They would thereafter have no assistants. Whatever they felt was important at the moment would be their work. Sergey sometimes liked to move his workplace right in the middle of a project he found interesting. And sometimes he or Larry would just take off somewhere. Even the communications people would have no idea where they were.
On one hand, the shift offloaded a lot of menial work to the assistants of other executives. Sergey wasn’t about to spend his time mailing packages, so one of Eric’s assistants wound up doing it. Using Google’s calendar application, which allowed people to share their schedules, certain Google executives and their helpers would make appointments for the founders. Larry and Sergey would regularly attend the key weekly meetings—the Operating Committee on Monday, the global product strategy sessions on Monday and Tuesday, product reviews at the end of the week, and TGIF at 4:30 on Friday. You could expect them to be present when the board convened. But they wanted to keep much of the week open. “My favorite meeting,” says Page, “is the absence of meetings.”
It went without saying that Page’s least favorite meetings were one-on-one press interviews. “Larry can be a very, very sensitive and good person,” says one former Google PR hand, “but he has major trust issues and few social graces. Sergey has social graces, but he doesn’t trust people who he thinks don’t approach his level of intelligence.”
Googlers learned to adapt to this system. If someone needed the founders’ approval for a purchase or project, the accepted strategy was stalking. Like the network of amateurs who sit with binoculars at airports and track the peregrinations of private planes, an informal Google pipeline delivered a steady stream of Larry or Sergey sightings. Canny Googlers hoarded knowledge of key interception points. “If I want an opportunity to meet with them, my best option is to go to Building 43 and just plop myself on a couch somewhere,” says George Salah. An APM named Jini Kim once got a key approval from Larry by gathering intelligence on his movements and loitering in his expected trajectory. Googlers also knew that there was an elusive window of access in the few minutes following a TGIF. But sometimes you could carefully plot a collision course with a founder and be frustrated when one of them was engaged in deep conversation with the Mexican mogul Carlos Slim or some other visiting dignitary. Or they would simply be in a hurry. Page in particular was a master of the drive-by greeting, flashing a wide, happy-to-see-you smile while slightly picking up his pace, so that if you attempted to follow up with anything more than a quick hello, you found yourself talking at his receding back. “Larry got rid of his assistants so that he would never meet with anyone who couldn’t figure out how to get a meeting with him,” says product manager Wesley Chan. “If you wanted a meeting with him, you had to find out where he was and harass him.”
Larry’s and Sergey’s peripatetic ways could drive Googlers crazy. Even Eric Schmidt sometimes viewed them acerbically: “Larry will call and say, ‘I’m going to go visit Android,’” he says, referring to Google’s mobile phone project. “He’s not going over there to inspect—he’s going over there to have fun.” But Maria Montessori might approve. “To be … helpful,” she wrote, “it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.”