I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [158]
Overture was at the conference too. Their representative spent most of his time trying to convince our sales director, Tim Armstrong, to hire him. I took that as another good sign.
Our attack on Overture's business had been in the works for months, from the time Larry and Sergey had given the green light to AdWords Select. Launching an ad-syndication network was a major undertaking and new ground for Google. Omid realized it would take a unique combination of knowledge and skill to pull it off. Joan Braddi, the head of our sales team, could do it, but she was bogged down selling search services and managing the day-to-day sales effort. She would be part of the team, but she would need the help of a specialist. Omid knew exactly whom to call.
Alan Louie had worked with Joan and Omid at Netscape and now operated as an independent consultant. Lean, energetic, and given to wearing shades and safari hats, Alan had a degree in physics and had worked as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena before moving into sales. He only took on unusual jobs and he only worked part-time. He didn't want direct reports. He didn't want to manage a team. He would handle the project, then leave when it was done. He started on contract at Google in October 2001. His assignment was to close the AOL deal, and he went about it with the dispassionate precision of an assassin stalking a high-profile target.
In addition to Alan and Joan, Omid pulled in Miriam Rivera, the second lawyer to join our legal group. John Barabino, who would head the syndication effort once the AOL deal was completed, became part of the team the day he was hired in February 2002.
Alan understood exactly what was at stake, and he knew the opposition. Overture had been born as GoTo in Pasadena, right down the street from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Even though they drew talent from Cal Tech and were plenty smart, they weren't Silicon Valley smart. They weren't really a tech company, and they didn't have the business intelligence Alan saw at Google. On the other hand, they had come up with the idea of marrying ads with search and implemented it before Google had.
When Omid called the AOL business-development unit run by David Colburn, AOL agreed to start talks with Google. Not because they intended to give us their business, but because they could use Google as a bludgeon to beat a better deal out of Overture when their contract came up for renewal.
Alan expected that. AOL was the giant of the Internet, with more traffic than any other site. They were doing deals every day and had enormous leverage. They had a reputation for being aggressive, foul-tempered, bloodthirsty, and brutal—and that was with their partners. Google was a pipsqueak trying to break up AOL's happy marriage to Overture with AdWords Select, an untested, unlaunched product with uncertain revenue potential. AOL was already making millions off Overture ads and had little incentive to put that guaranteed revenue at risk.
None of that fazed Alan or the Google team, who approached AOL as if we were already peers, not supplicants. "They wanted an emperor-to-toe-kisser kind of relationship," Alan recalls. "We came off as, 'Okay, you can be emperor, but we'll be the pope.'" Part of the team's swagger came from their sense that AOL was heading up a blind alley toward a dead end. AOL was a walled garden offering screened, selected content to its subscribers. Google was coming from the Internet, an open system without limits. "We knew it was the overconfidence of youth, but it turned out to be correct," Alan told me. "It's just the confidence of knowing the industry and knowing what's going on."
Still, AOL was not going to come to Google to discuss the deal, so Google went