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[...] 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. We were so inundated with fan mail I became verklempt.
"Your mothers must be so proud," a user told us. "I want my son to work at Google."
We received more letters of praise when we did the same thing the following year, but we also received pointed questions about why there weren't any African-American moms depicted. We answered that not all staff members were represented—but it was the last time our mothers put in an appearance.
"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 grocery bills!" rejoined others.
"No," said Sergey, shaking his head solemnly. "Opportunity cost."
fuck u too
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. Almost always we said no. We spent valuable time evaluating vendors. Why spare our competitors the same hardship by tipping them off that we had found a company worthy of our business? It would be far better if our competition made its own choices, and, perhaps, chose badly.
what a dumb fucking way to advance an ecosystem. the stupidity of incessant competition over collaboration. deliberately ensuring that competitors duplicate your work simply because you want to win
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.
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 advise us on desirable features. The friend, David Jeske, counseled us on what to ask for, then added that, by the way, he and a buddy were building a CRM product called Trakken—if we were interested. It wasn't really finished yet, but Larry's other Stanford pals at Wunderground.com were using it.
Interested? Interested in an untested CRM product still in development with one tiny client? Created by a company of two people? Sure, that's just what I was looking for—another risky technology with no support and no track record behind it. I thanked David for his help and, because he was a friend of Larry's, assured him we'd be happy to send him our request for proposal.
Meanwhile, our real search was well under way. One vendor couldn't provide any support for non-English email. Another had a terrible UI because it was a first-generation product. A third seemed overpriced and their salesman's aggressive stance made us wary of doing business with them. Only one company offered a reasonable solution, and we began negotiating with them in earnest. With our leading contender scheduled to make a presentation to our finance, operations, and sales departments, I felt confident I could convince Larry and Sergey to loosen the purse strings and do it right this time: spend money for a high-quality, stable system from a respected vendor.
I hoped Larry's friend had taken the hint and forgotten about us. It would be a frosty day in Hades before we'd make the mistake of buying a bargain-basement CRM solution again. No such luck. Jeske came back ready to present his proposal. He emailed us his slides and let us know we should print copies for the attendees and that we would need to set up a projector for his demo. I had to laugh at his chutzpah. I didn't really have the time for what I knew would be a dead end, but a friend of Larry's is a friend of Larry's, so I agreed to give him a half hour. What he showed us was surprisingly well thought out, but still not ready for beta testing. Many of the essential features we required were missing, and the interface lacked the polish of the others we'd seen.
[...]
"Larry," I explained slowly and carefully, "we just went through hell with an undeveloped product. I can't burden my team with another flaky piece of software that will just slow us down. We're close with a real CRM company and should have a proposal in a couple of days. I'll let David down gently."
"No. Really," Larry repeated. "You should hire these guys. Look, they're a small company and they'll be very responsive. We can give them space in the office and they'll live here and build their product to our specs. We'll be their most important client, and we'll benefit from their growth based on our product design ideas. Have Biz Dev negotiate the contract and make sure we get some equity."
[...]
That guy was kind of a jerk anyway, so telling him no didn't bother me, but I'd still be cursing Larry's decision today if not for one small thing: Larry was absolutely right. Though we wasted weeks negotiating our investment in Jeske's nascent company NeoTonic (we squeezed just an extra one-tenth of one percent in equity out of them), by the end of October 2001 we had the new Trakken CRM system running in parallel with Miasma. David and Brandon lived in our office and Denise Griffin, our user-support manager, gave them a daily list of desired features and bug fixes. Unlike the big "reliable" company I had wanted to hire, NeoTonic didn't have hundreds of customers using the same product. They didn't release upgrades only twice a year. They fixed things as they came up, in priority order. Within a couple of months we had the CRM system we wanted, built to our specs, fully stable and intuitive to use. We cut our ties with Miasma and never looked back. A year and a half later, we bought the rest of NeoTonic, making its two founders full-time Googlers.
i mean yeah nepotism seems bad and all but from a business perspective, larry is obviously in the right here (given that he wants people who will work their asses off to make him happy), and it's almost cute that the author genuinely did not recognise this aspect
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 lightening the load and the unbeatable value of unpaid labor. Google parsed all its tough problems into manageable pieces and parceled them out.
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 democracy of the web," because each link was a vote cast in favor of a site's credibility. That approach made Google scale better than the competition, because the more the web expanded, the more links Google harvested for its ranking algorithm.
these people love to throw the term "democracy" around when they're the ones unilaterally deciding the rules
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 cost—saving measures, such as paying for translation by the word and not the job. That alone cut our expenses in half.
lol
"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 policy manual. But we would have one by the meeting the following Monday. Five minutes after that exchange, Omid was on the phone to Sheryl. "Overture has a binder," he told her. "We have to have a binder! We have to have a binder!"
Sheryl and AdWords staffer Emily White spent the weekend pulling one together. While they were at it, they pulled together an editorial team. AOL wanted to know how many people Google had dedicated to reviewing ads and approving them. By enlisting everyone in advertising operations who had ever looked at an ad, Sheryl stretched four to fifteen. "We didn't lie to them," she asserted, "but we included everyone we possibly could."
amazing, such classic fake-it-til-you-make-it behaviour
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 went live, John Bauer added code that boldfaced the keyword a user had searched for when it appeared in an ad, making it obvious that the ad was relevant. That single improvement increased clickthrough rates by four hundred percent. One engineer. One change. Four hundred percent.
it's amazing how the situation leads us to believe that so much impact could be attributed to one single change, when really an alternate explanation is that it was an obvious change which should have been present anyway, others just missed it, this guy saw it first. engineer hero worship is dumb. none of this is a solo effort