I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [119]
We nodded our heads and interjected where we could, muttering amens and hosannas when he let us. He seemed to hear some of it. When we let him know that Google t-shirts were our biggest expense, he smiled approvingly.
"That's fine. Keep doing that. If someone likes our product enough to want to wear our brand, we should do everything we can to make it possible. And it's great for staff morale to have everyone decked out in the company logo." He would soon be signing off on expenditures for preshrunk cotton in the seven-figure range.
Cindy and I agreed we needed to bring Eric up to speed. I drafted a memo laying out our brand strategy and listing our guiding principles:
PR and word of mouth work better than ads.
Paid ads work against our brand. Focus on the "joy of discovery."*
We'll grow faster getting current users to search more than by mass marketing.
All our promotions must include a way to measure success.
Product interaction is, and must remain, the primary branding experience.
User retention efforts should center on improving UI and user support.
I dropped the memo into Eric's inbox and copied Larry and Sergey. The response was deafening, as in, I must have gone deaf because I didn't hear anything. I took that as a good sign. We received no more unsolicited feedback from Eric on how to spend our budget. Apparently he realized that we were doing the right thing. Or, more likely, he figured that if we screwed up, our impact on the company's overall health would amount to little more than a sneeze. Or maybe he was just focused on our number one priority: finding women.
"Larry and Sergey did research," HR senior manager Stacy Sullivan told me, "and they believed that having a good gender mix created a healthier work environment. For the few women that you had, [hiring more women] made their lives so much better. They had a community."
It's true that male-skewed tech companies sometimes devolved into frat-boy funhouses, and I never doubted Larry and Sergey's commitment to hiring technically adept women. However, I often wondered whether the ideal of a "healthier work environment" wasn't driven by our founders' own deeper need to lead lives that contained more than code. At the Mercury News we had once run an ad in which we assured readers: "In some parts of the world, the language of love is not Java." Google was not one of those places. Hiring more women would not only forestall a Neanderthal culture, it would increase the odds of socialization and ultimately continuation of the species. Given that Larry and Sergey more or less lived at the office, it hardly surprised anyone that each of them dated members of the staff. It would have been more of a shock if they had actually met women they deemed acceptably intelligent and not recruited them to Google just so they could see them on occasion.
Whatever the rationale, I discovered that the emphasis on gender equality was real.
"Why don't we have Google t-shirts for women?" Sergey demanded of me after a female visitor left the office with our standard extra-large men's t-shirt. He was as upset as I'd ever seen him. When a woman in France chastised him about American companies and their enormously oversized t-shirts that no French woman would wear, he insisted we address the problem once and for all. I ordered women's shirts—more than I thought we could ever give away—but we couldn't keep them in stock. I didn't understand why they were so popular, given our limited female staff,