I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [101]
"I was excited about it," Chad told me after the fact. "It was like high school and TP-ing someone's house. Why not try it and see what happens?"
I'd seen managers build consensus before moving ahead with unpopular decisions, and I knew bosses who dipped their toes in untested waters, fully prepared to pull out quickly if the temperature rose above or dropped below their comfort level. This was a different kind of leadership. Larry was so suffused with conviction that he simply brushed aside opposition and ran toward risk without fear or hesitation. He was absolutely convinced that unfiltered ads were the right thing to do.
In retrospect, Larry's and Chad's zeal may reflect the difference in our stages of life. I was a middle-aged father with a lot to lose if Google died on the vine. Chad and Larry were just beginning their careers. They could afford to flame out in Silicon Valley, where bold failures earn more respect than incremental success.
Not all mid-life guys are too conservative to survive startups, but to be successful you have to love uncertainty the way Chad loved pork chops. You need enormous reserves of energy to undertake everything thrown your way—along with the confidence to bounce back each time you fall off the high wire and hit the ground hard. I had moved to Nagoya before I could speak Japanese and to Novosibirsk without a word of Russian. I'd jumped from a steady job at the Merc to an unsecured position in an unknown company without a safety net. I didn't fear the unknown. Neither did I want to see my brave new world implode because of reckless, ill-considered decisions. I found it increasingly difficult to judge what fell into that category.
There were people my age at Google when I joined and people older than me within a few months. Hardware designer Will Whitted had been fifty-four when he started, and he saw no gap between his thought process and that of his younger colleagues. "I think that I think younger, which probably means more irresponsibly, than most people do," he confessed. "There were people at Google who had the opposite problem—who were a little younger than me, but perceived by people who mattered to be old-thinking. To be slow and overly conservative, and it got them in trouble."
Those who succeeded, as I was trying to do, needed to be open to new ideas regardless of their source or seeming defiance of logic.
It's hard to accept that everything you know is wrong, or at least needs to be proved right all over again. Larry's decision to run unscreened ads opened the scab over my opposition to messing with our logo. It tested my resolve to adopt a wide perspective—to see the panorama of opportunity opening for us, rather than the walls fencing us in. If Google were filled only with people who shared a "big-company" perspective on reducing risks, we would never reap the rare fruits that flourished only in environmental extremes.
The First Family of Online Advertising
Larry had decided. We would launch our new do-it-yourself ad program in late 2000. Now we began debating what to call it. "AdsToo" was engineering's working name (it was version two of the ads system and engineers are very literal people). No one wanted that to become the permanent moniker.
Since no one person or department owned product identity, the process got messy. Larry wanted a name that didn't sound funny if you said it five times fast. Omid wanted separation between the Google name and the name of the ad product (so no "Googlads"). Those were the only guidelines. Suggestions flew in from all quarters, each beloved by its originator and endorsed by odd lots of others.
Salar supported "prestoAds" before deciding it was too seventies. He switched his allegiance to "Self-serve Ads," which clearly described the product's unique feature.
"AdsDirect" had