I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [164]
Sheryl had been planning to double her department to eight full-time staffers. Now when she did the math, she realized she needed forty-seven people—immediately. She would need fifty more soon after that. The day the deal was announced, Sheryl put out a plea for staff volunteers to work on approving ads twenty hours per week for at least two weeks. The engineers offered some resistance.
"Doesn't everyone working here already have a job to do?" asked one, before pointing out that expanding the human component of the system was a flaw. Scaling by adding staff instead of algorithms and hardware would be a mistake. Salar came to Sheryl's defense and pointed out that there was a long list of tools that needed to be created, but not every task could be automated. Besides, Larry and Sergey had endorsed the idea of staff volunteers. Few were persuaded.
With almost no volunteers, Sheryl moved on to plan B. She called an agency and requested they send over fifty temps. Two days after the contract went into effect, dozens of temporary workers sat at desks in the open area we had used for TGIF meetings. Alana Karen from AdWords support stood at the front of the room and started walking them step by step through the process of approving an ad. Mass confusion ensued. The temps had no clue about online advertising, no familiarity with our approval process, and very little computer literacy. And the approval-tool software barely functioned. Sheryl watched with increasing frustration until she couldn't take it anymore. She marched upstairs to confront the half-dozen ads engineers.
"Come on," Sheryl said politely but firmly. "Come with me."
"Wait a minute," the group's manager protested. "You can't just take the entire engineering group with you somewhere."
"You come, too," Sheryl told him, using a tone she had developed as chief of staff to the U.S. secretary of the treasury. The engineers followed her downstairs and stood at the back of the training room as Alana tried to teach the temps to use the approval software they had written.
After a torturous hour, they stepped outside to talk to Sheryl. "The software doesn't work," they admitted. "We're going to rebuild it for you this weekend." Sheryl told the temps they would be paid for that morning and the next day, but not to come back until Monday.
On Monday all the temps came back, but they still weren't up to the task. Within two weeks, Sheryl had weeded out all but one of them.
On to plan C.
Sheryl cast her net at Stanford, which was stocked with recent graduates about to enter a dot-bombed local economy with few jobs. She promised them temporary positions that could convert to full-time if they worked hard and came up to speed quickly. The temp-to-hire program immediately took off, and dozens of history and sociology and philosophy majors unexpectedly had something to do the day after graduation. They would be AdWords reps.
Meanwhile, Eric Schmidt, the enormous AOL guarantee gnawing at his serenity like an ulcer, hovered about Sheryl's cube asking for updates. "So, how many advertisers do we have?" he'd ask. We needed to add tens of thousands to catch up to Overture.
"We're here," Sheryl would reply, pointing at a number on a spreadsheet.
"How many advertisers do we have now?" he'd ask a few hours later.
"Not many more than the last time you checked," Sheryl would say with the patience of a mom answering her child's query "Are we there yet?" We didn't pass Overture that first day, or even the first week, but it wasn't long before Google's ad network was as large as that of our biggest competitor.
More advertisers generated more ads, which required more AdWords reps to approve them. Sheryl's universe expanded from the AOL big bang until it filled half a building, and still it showed no signs of slowing. By October 2002, we had rented additional space