I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [15]
Very smart people were obsessing about the viability of Google's back end, and unbeknownst to me, I would soon be obsessing about the viability of my own.
Meet the Marketers
"Once she had accomplished that," Cindy was explaining to our small marketing team, "she had the world by its oyster."
I smiled. New fodder for the quote board I'd pinned up on my cubicle wall, which still featured Cindy's last pronouncement, "That's what happens when that happens."
Our department consisted of a small cadre with mixed levels of experience in marketing. Cindy was the boss and acting VP. She was close to my age, very funny (usually intentionally), and always in a hurry, which led to an alarming number of emails in which her fingers failed to keep up with her thoughts. She had started as a print journalist, then done PR duty under some of the most notorious tycoons in the Valley, where she had become personally acquainted with every reporter who talked or typed about technology. She focused on public relations, which Larry and Sergey supported as the most cost-effective way to promote the company.
Cindy exuded a wholesome Laura Petrie vibe that I found comforting, and I felt a connection with her because of our common history at newspapers. As she bounced around the department, a whirling dynamo of positive energy, she urged us to take risks, try new things, and let nothing stand in our way. We started referring to her as "Small. But mighty." Those qualities cut both ways.
"Larry and Sergey were always skeptical about traditional marketing," Cindy recalls. "They wanted Google to stand apart from others by not doing what everyone else was doing ... Let the other guys with inferior products blow their budgets on noise-making, while we stayed focused on building a better mousetrap." That skepticism translated into constant questioning about everything marketing proposed. The department only existed because someone (a board member or a friend from Stanford) had insisted the founders needed people to do all the stuff that wasn't engineering.
Cindy pushed back against the constant pressure to prove her department was not a waste of payroll, but she also let us know that expectations were high. When we performed below her professional standards, she rebuked us for "Mickey Mouse behavior" with an intensity as devastating and unexpected as the tornados that swept her native Nebraska. I learned to keep an eye out for storm warnings.
My counterpart on the offline branding side of things was Shari Fujii, a thin, thoughtful, hyperkinetic marketing professional with an MBA and a tendency to exclaim that the impact of any given action would be "huge." We often commiserated about Larry and Sergey's abysmal lack of regard for our department and its work. Coming out of a company run by journalists, I found it more of the same, but Shari struggled to make it fit with her experience at brand-driven companies, where marketing summoned the sun to begin each new day.
The other key player in my world was Karen White, the webmaster. Karen had been a casino dealer in North Dakota when she decided to teach herself the ins and outs of creating web pages. Cindy had discovered her at a previous job and brought her to Google. I soon understood why. Karen had the organizational skills and disposition of a NASA launch coordinator. Industrious, objective, unflappable, and willing to stretch her day across multiple time zones, Karen took all the words I threw together and arranged them in pretty columns on our website. She had more influence on the overall look of Google than anyone who worked on it after Larry and Sergey's original "non-design" design.
Other than Susan Wojcicki, who had put her MBA to work at Intel, our group was new to marketing. Google hired Stanford grads in bulk and set them loose in the halls.