I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [175]
Overture's Content Match service didn't go live until the end of June. One reason for the lag may have been that Overture had planned to base their technology on content-targeting software from Applied Semantics, a company in Santa Monica. In April, Google bought Applied Semantics, bolstering our own capabilities while cutting the legs from under our competitor, which now had to look elsewhere for the technology or develop it themselves as we had done.
The firm was our largest acquisition to date, and we welcomed our Southern California colleagues at TGIF with beer and sushi served from atop a custom surfboard painted with a logo saying, "Google Santa Monica." The board was an apt metaphor. Content-targeted ads were the next big wave in online revenue, and we intended to ride it all the way to the beach.
Chapter 23
Froogle and Friction
MY THIRD YEAR at Google was rushing to a close. Everything shifted as the company transformed itself from startup to global powerhouse. New patterns and rituals slid into place, locked down, and began to feel permanent.
In October 2002, our department took up residence in the Saladoplex building with the AdWords team, my seventh (or eighth?) move since joining the company. I now had a closet office of my own with a wall-sized whiteboard and a window overlooking the patio. There was a micro-kitchen twenty feet away, and the gym—a converted computer mainframe room with an elevated floor and sub-zero air conditioning—was just around the corner. I felt completely embedded in my cozy corner of the organization and amazed at how many Googlers swarmed around me. (Ants, too. They found a hole in my window's insulation and a path into my Google gumball dispenser.) There were so many Googlers that the company stopped giving out stock options to new hires. Or, rather, deferred them. The government said that if we had five hundred shareholders we would have to make our financial records available, as if we were a public company. Instead, we kept hiring, but held back stock grants. The SEC would have some questions about that when we filed for our IPO.
I worked with the PMs on budgets for their 2003 initiatives, a task I could no longer complete satisfactorily with wild-assed guesses and a couple of bullet points. We had a CFO who paid microscopic attention to detail, and even Eric was heard to mutter, "Shit, we'd better take this seriously. We're going to be a billion-dollar company." He joked that we'd better not screw up things like audit trails that might send him to jail, an increasingly common destination for CEOs in the wake of the Enron meltdown. He said it so often, I came to realize he wasn't joking.
My world had grown large enough to split apart through mitotic division. Customer service was absorbed by Sheryl Sandberg's world o' AdWords, and marketing communications took up residence in Jonathan Rosenberg's product-management realm under the stewardship of Christopher Escher. Escher's groups would be devoted to supporting our revenue initiatives, which thankfully freed me from grinding out sales collateral and presentations. My new role revolved entirely around the products and services touched directly by users, so Cindy changed my title to director of consumer marketing and brand management.
My circle on Google's Venn diagram of responsibilities now overlapped Marissa Mayer's almost completely. She shepherded new services to market. I branded them. But branding originated with the products and the text included in them. So who made the final decision on what that text should say? The product manager or the brand manager? Ah, there's the rub.
Marissa let me know that she viewed me as the product