Google's obsession with metrics was forcing me to take stock of my own capabilities. What did I bring to the table? What were my limits? How did I compare? Insecurity was a game all Googlers could play, especially about intellectual inferiority. Everyone but a handful felt they were bringing down...
In mid-2003, Susan put some product plans and strategic documents on MOMA that required a password to access. She was concerned that the sales team might accidentally spill too much to clients. As head of product management, Jonathan told her to make the documents accessible because Google so str...
What if we let users opt out of accepting our cookies altogether? I liked that idea, but Marissa raised an interesting point. We would clearly want to set the default as "accept Google's cookies." If we fully explained what that meant to most users, however, they would probably prefer not to acce...
Eric Schmidt's choice of Susan's mid-range revenue estimate proved unduly conservative. By the end of the contract's first year, we were far above the highest projections. Part of that success may have been attributable to a small shift made by an enterprising engineer. The day after the deal wen...
"Here are Overture's policies," AOL said, dropping a phonebook-sized document on the table with a thud. "These are their editorial policies for what is allowed and what is not. Let's see yours."
"Fine. We'll show you ours," Alan replied. "Let's set up an appointment and do it right." We had no...
It had taken us a while to post our position, interview candidates, and extend an offer, so it was August 2001 before Stephanie Kerebel, a native of France, joined our group as globalization manager. She had years of experience in dealing with professional translators and immediately implemented ...
This divide-and-conquer approach even informed the basic algorithms running Google search. Rather than basing search results solely on a single source—the content of individual web pages—Google looked at links created by millions of people to determine a site's importance. Sergey called it "the d...
Insofar as we had a clear strategy, a big part of it seemed to be getting other people to do our work for free. Nowadays that's known as "crowd-sourcing." We just called it "cutting costs." Self-service AdWords, porn cookies, affiliate programs, viral marketing—all were based on many hands lighte...
Composing a list of new CRM vendors didn't take long. Fewer than half a dozen major players offered stable, well-tested systems. Google's tech evaluation team would ensure we weren't sold a bill of goods (though they hadn't kept us from choosing Miasma), and Larry had a college friend who would a...
When Karen took a vacation, we ordered a thousand plastic playground balls and filled her cube with them. They were still being thrown from office to office and rolling around under desks a year later.
Google didn't acknowledge outside firms that served the company—not even for client references. As the company grew in size and stature, suppliers begged for permission to announce their ties to us, often offering steep discounts if they could just display Google's logo on their client lists. Alm...
"Do you know what our greatest corporate expense is?" Sergey asked at TGIF. The assembled Googlers looked up from their laptops. Everyone wanted the chance to be right in front of others.
"Health insurance!" shouted an engineer. "Salaries!" "Servers!" "Taxes!"
"Electricity!" "Charlie's gro...
[...] To prove that Google wasn't composed entirely of metal and wiring attached to positronic brains, I suggested we collect photos of moms from our coworkers and arrange them around the old poem spelling out "What Mother Means to Me." Straight out of the Hallmark emotional-manipulation handbook...
About the time Ian Marsden's first Doodle ran, Karen hired an intern to help with updating the website. The intern, Dennis Hwang, was majoring in art and computer science and had helped with graphics for the gator-gone-wild horror flick Lake Placid ("You'll never know what bit you"). During his i...
Perhaps because they viewed the world through a polarizing filter of "ideal" and "suboptimal" (or "good" and "evil," if you will) and were so confident about which position they occupied in this binary system, our founders displayed a fondness for hyperbolic vilification of those who disagreed wi...
"The most important thing to consider," I began, "is that our own internal research shows our competitors are beginning to approach Google's level of quality. In a world where all search engines are equal, we'll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from everyone else."
The room grew qu...
Had NewsHound been a disruptive technology that changed its industry, Larry and Sergey would have wanted not just the code but the Google-caliber engineers behind it. That way, Google would own their future breakthrough ideas as well as the ones they'd already developed. Larry and Sergey didn't l...
Jeff couldn't wait to engage the challenges at Google. He showed up weeks before his official start date, before he'd even left the other company, and wrote code without being on the payroll because he "wanted to hit the ground running."
In February 1998, a small Pasadena company named GoTo started auctioning placement in search results they bought from other providers. Six months later, they claimed to have more than a thousand paying customers. According to GoTo, you didn't need fancy algorithms to determine relevance, just the...
Graded gardens on hillsides, a succession of terraces whose every stone step ejected a gaudy grasshopper, dropped from ledge to ledge seaward, with the olives and the oleanders fairly toppling over each other in their haste to obtain a view of the beach. There our child kneeled motionless to be p...
Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love—from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter—to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimagi...
The dull day had dwindled to a pale yellow streak in the gray west when, acting upon an impulse, I decided to visit my old tutor. Like a sleepwalker, I mounted the familiar steps and automatically knocked on the half-open door bearing his name. In a voice that was a jot less abrupt, and a trifle ...
But in England, at least in the England of my youth, the national dread of showing off and a too grim preoccupation with solid teamwork were not conducive to the development of the goalie’s eccentric art. This at least was the explanation I dug up for not being oversuccessful on the playing field...
[...] the sense of leaving Russia was totally eclipsed by the agonizing thought that Reds or no Reds, letters from Tamara would be still coming, miraculously and needlessly, to southern Crimea, and would search there for a fugitive addressee, and weakly flap about like bewildered butterflies set ...
[...] During that last summer in the country, we used to part forever after each secret meeting when, in the fluid blackness of the night, on that old wooden bridge between masked moon and misty river, I would kiss her warm, wet eyelids and rain-chilled face, and immediately after go back to her ...