I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [118]
"It's not real money," I repeated to myself. "It's not real money." We had no CEO. We had no CFO. No one was making plans to go public. I went back to work, but I hummed a happy tune as I did so.
A CEO? Now IPO?
"Schwim? You have a question?" Sergey asked, knowing full well what the question would be.
"Yes," said Schwim, standing up at the front of the TGIF meeting in February 2001. The Nooglers had been introduced. Larry and Sergey had reviewed the news of the week. Omid had completed his slide show. Now it was time for Q and A.
"What's the status of the CEO search?" Schwim wanted to know. It was the same question he asked every week. We all were aware there was a checklist of items to be completed before the company could go public and our stock options would have real value. A CEO was on the list. Also a Chief Financial Officer.
Sergey paused for dramatic effect. "We're making progress," he said with a serious look. It was the same answer he gave every week.
When I joined in 1999, many of us assumed that Google would be public within a year. We weren't obsessed with the idea of an IPO, but it was the height of the dot-com era, and that's what startups did after they'd been around for six months. Larry and Sergey didn't seem in any hurry. They felt no urgency to hire a CEO despite the board's prodding. Sometimes they would make a dismissive remark about a candidate they had interviewed. They didn't give names, just vague disqualifications based on a lack of tech savvy or "Googleyness."
At TGIF on March 23, 2001, Larry and Sergey introduced two Nooglers to the assembled staff: Dirk Aguilar as an international advertising analyst and Eric Schmidt as chairman of Google's board of directors. It was assumed that Eric would be made Google's CEO as soon as he could disentangle himself from his responsibilities as CEO of Novell. I was thrilled, not because I knew Eric and felt he would lead us to search dominance, but because the long wait was finally over. That light we could see at the end of the tunnel was Google's ticker symbol circling the NASDAQ sign in Times Square.*
When I learned that Google had hired a "corporate" CEO, I allowed myself a glimmer of hope. Surely someone who had worked for large, competitive companies like Novell and Sun Microsystems would get the importance of strong marketing. Maybe he would see branding as a powerful tool for claiming market share. Maybe he would want to tell the Google story in new and creative ways around the world. Maybe he would feed Cindy's anemic staff, build my spindly budget, and transform our ninety-seven-pound department into a five-hundred-pound gorilla. Maybe he would cure lepers and help the blind to see. Who knew? I did. Larry and Sergey would never hire someone like that.
"I don't believe in trade shows," Eric informed Cindy and me at a get-acquainted meeting he set up shortly after coming onboard. There was a new sheriff in town and our days of profligate spending and freewheeling excess had ended. Eric's ideas about marketing mirrored those of our founders, only with a paranoid edge sharpened by experience.
"I've seen how the budgets for industry shows grow and grow," Eric regaled us, "until they're so bloated you're paying for warehouses full of booths and furniture and trucks to haul them around. We're not going to do that."
"We're not going to spend money on mass-media marketing," he continued. "No TV spots or big magazine spreads. And everything you buy needs to be on a purchase order signed off by me personally."
I sat back, stunned by the implication that we were an overweight cost center that needed to be taught self-discipline. We had never done a trade show. We had one booth—a crappy pop-up frame that traveled around in a