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Other prototype projects by individual engineers were available in an area of our website called Google labs, but Marissa didn't believe orkut belonged there. It would be an exception—a standalone product, without Google branding, launched with lightning speed. If there were problems, few people would notice and there would be time to fix them. If anyone asked whether orkut was a Google initiative, we would answer that we could "neither confirm nor deny" a relationship between orkut and Google.

That did not sit well with Cindy, who had no desire to play coy with the press contacts she had so carefully cultivated over the years. "Reporters are not stupid," she warned the executive staff, "and we'll look silly saying this." All it took was one online search to find Orkut's connection to Google, and once the press had that, orkut would be branded a Google product whether we denied it or not. I worked on messaging to make it clear that orkut was developed by a Google engineer but was not an official Google project. Marissa rejected any such compromise. She was adamant that no explicit Google connection be revealed on the orkut site itself.

Sergey stepped in to resolve our standoff shortly before he, Larry, and Eric headed off to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "Let's make it an experiment," he said. "We'll launch without Google affiliation and neither confirm nor deny a relationship. If it gets out of control, then contact me in Davos and we'll come up with a new plan. Any problems with that approach?"

Oh yeah. Cindy had a big problem with that approach, and she let Sergey know it. This experiment, she pointed out, could destroy our brand reputation as well as her professional credibility. Sergey retreated to a fallback position. He endorsed launching orkut without any Google branding, but he conceded that if asked, we could admit orkut had been developed at Google.

On January 21, 2004, the day before the scheduled launch, Jonathan voiced reservations. He advised Eric Schmidt that we should wait to launch orkut until after our global sales conference and the company ski trip, a two-week delay. Cindy told Jonathan his effort was appreciated, but it was too little, too late. We had wasted weeks trying to live with the conditions Marissa had set while repeatedly advising that it was wrong to lie to the press. Product management of orkut had been bungled from day one.

Urs, our Google Fellow, raised his own questions about the timing. He had been hearing all day from engineers about unresolved issues: that orkut was running on a single machine with no easy way to scale, that there had been no proper load testing, no security review, and no agreement on the privacy policy. Clearly orkut would not be able to handle the influx of traffic once word got out to the geek news site Slashdot,* which would take about fifteen minutes. It would be smarter, he said, to clean things up for a few days, wait for the execs to return from Switzerland, and avoid a huge mistake.

We all breathed a sigh of relief when Jonathan confirmed that he had spoken with most of the executive team and they had agreed with Urs it was better to delay the launch. It was a commendable idea to accelerate the launch process, but just too risky given all the red flags that had been raised. We would begin moving orkut off its Microsoft.NET server to the standard Google technology platform so it could scale more easily and then, most likely, launch it officially on Google labs. I had proposed exactly that strategy and believed it would set user expectations appropriately—everything on labs was by definition an experiment, subject to drastic changes or sudden shutdowns. Marissa thought a launch on labs would irritate users, because they would be able to see orkut, but not to try it unless they were invited by someone who was already a member. That didn't worry me as much as users thinking, as with Froogle, that a half-baked orkut was Google's flagship product in an entirely