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Miriam Rivera, the Google attorney who had worked herself to exhaustion on our AOL deal, also worked the Yahoo renewal. She remembers Yahoo being wary of Google to the point of paranoia and hesitant to strengthen us as a competitor. As a result they put the screws in. Hard. "I would not have done the deal," she said, reiterating what she had told Larry, Sergey, and Eric at the contract-review meeting. "They wanted an open kimono from us, where we would alert them to all the technology we had in development. They wanted parity—everything we developed, they would get too." Miriam didn't think it wise to constrain ourselves that way. Besides, our billion-dollar deal with AOL made the tens of millions Yahoo offered seem insufficient compensation for all they sought in return.

In the end, Omid's friendship with Udi Manber at Yahoo and Larry and Sergey's desire to stay on Yahoo's good side won out. Keep your friends close, went the strategy, and keep your enemies closer. We accepted the offered terms. From that point on, we had to notify Yahoo before we launched any new feature. When Miriam went on vacation, she carried a copy of the contract with her and took calls day or night about product-disclosure issues. Given Google's aversion to process, it upset everyone that we now had to check with our competitor before moving ahead on new technology.

The relationship began on rocky terms—a marriage of convenience that bound the partners together so neither could run too far ahead of the other. It was a relationship between a fading name and a rising star and destined to fall apart. Just a month later, in December 2002, Yahoo bought our competitor Inktomi and began working to replace Google's search results once and for all.

Chapter 22

We Need Another Billion-Dollar Idea

THERE," CINDY SAID to Jonathan Rosenberg, pointing toward the parking lot. "That's my car." As she spoke, a stretch Hummer rounded the corner, impossibly long and large. It had once been white, but now it was coated with mud from hood to trunk. We had added that finishing touch at Cindy's request, and she was pleased with our efforts. It was a complete and utter mess. Jonathan looked stunned for a moment, then laughed and picked up a bucket and a sponge and began swiping at the mud-covered windows. That's when we unleashed the water balloons.

Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google to bring structure to product management. He arrived none too soon. By the spring of 2002, the PMs were driving me nuts. In one twenty-four-hour period, I found myself in the middle of disputes between PMs and engineering, PMs and advertising support, and PMs and other PMs. Communication among our swelling groups kept slipping into darkness and dragging marketing along with it.

Jonathan had the unenviable task of corralling not just the new hires but also big-name old-timers like Susan, Salar, and Marissa, all of whom now ostensibly reported to him. They didn't always act that way. It was a classic syndrome of a startup becoming a real company—old-timers refusing to acknowledge that there were new rules to play by. One of those rules for every engineering and product-management employee was filing snippets, the weekly reports of projects currently under way and the progress that had been made on them since the previous week. Snippets were compiled and distributed automatically, and the software that did this had been written to insert snide comments about those who failed to file.

Jonathan wanted his product-management group to improve its compliance, and being extremely competitive, he decided the best way to encourage his staff and bond them together as a team was to challenge Cindy and her corporate marketing group to a contest. The head of the group ending the quarter with the lower percentage of snippets filed would have to wash the other manager's car while the winning team assaulted the loser with water balloons. We became the first group in the company to attain a one hundred percent filing