I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [205]
I kept knocking my head against the wall between corporate marketing and product management and got little more than a migraine for my efforts. I went to Marissa's weekly launch meetings but had only occasional glimpses into products that were early in development. One of those was desktop search, which now was called "Fluffy Bunnies," because its original name, "Total Recall," had been deemed too scary from a privacy standpoint. Fluffy Bunnies would index the hard drive on a personal computer and make it searchable. I argued vehemently that we needed to give users a warning up front—"This product is not like others you may have used. Please read the privacy policy carefully"—but my tone was considered too alarmist. I did convince the team to use the descriptive line "Search your own computer," though Marissa found it colloquial, redundant, and "lame, lame, lame."
The CIA bought one of our Google Search Appliances for their intranet and asked if they could customize our logo by replacing an O with their seal. I told our sales rep to give them the okay if they promised not to tell anyone. I didn't want it spooking privacy advocates. "Do you think they can keep a secret?" I asked her.
I hired a writer to take on some of the load—Michael Krantz, a funny, gifted journalist who had covered Silicon Valley for Time magazine and understood technology. He got the job because he put together a prospective April Fools' joke that made me laugh.
Having writing help freed up some of my time, giving me the opportunity to attend the series of finance fairs Jonathan had arranged for the company, with representatives from firms like Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, and UBS explaining how to invest prudently and avoid excessive taxes. Many of these advisors had been randomly dialing every phone extension at Google for months, trying to line up clients before the IPO. I had ignored the calls, but now I was curious about what the professionals had to say. The IPO was coming in August and I needed to think about what it might mean for me.
The road to the IPO was rocky. Larry and Sergey wanted to sell stock directly to the public through a Dutch auction, in which the stock price would be gradually lowered until all shares were sold. They thought that would be democratic and allow broad participation. They saw the traditional way of going public as a broken system. Wall Street investment banks insisted on pricing shares artificially low so that they popped up on the first day of trading and the banks made a killing on the shares they owned. To Larry and Sergey, it was deceptive and inefficient and only the banks benefited. They spurned the bankers and told them Google would do it differently. The bankers fought back, constantly bad-mouthing Google's stock, its management, and its idiosyncratic IPO process.* Estimates for the opening price of Google shares sank below the high end of one hundred twenty-five dollars because there was less demand than anticipated amid all the disparaging chatter and a sagging stock market.
Admittedly, Larry and Sergey didn't help much. The report from their road show, in which they traveled to various cities flogging our offering to institutional investors, was that they weren't taking the presentation any more seriously than they took our weekly TGIF meetings. In other words, Sergey didn't look at the slides before speaking about them, and commented that the information they contained was wrong, or not very good, or of dubious origins. The energy levels were low, the handoffs sloppy, and the attitude so laid-back as to be disrespectful.
People noticed. BusinessWeek reported that when Sergey was "asked about Google's strategy for