I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [207]
"The thing I remember about the IPO," Paul Bucheit told me recently, "is how much of a non-event it was. I was at Microsoft the day Windows 95 went gold,* and that was a huge party. I got in a little late, and the place was just destroyed. The carpet was torn up because someone brought a motorcycle inside. Tables were smashed and they had gone through some enormous amount of alcohol. It was a big deal. The IPO was not that big a deal. Everyone was just working. Kind of remarkable."
Larry and Sergey did all they could to keep the company culture as it had been. Wayne Rosing told the engineers that he would personally greet anyone who showed up the next day driving a Ferrari, and that he would gladly redecorate the new car with his baseball bat. That didn't worry engineers Ed Karrels and Chad Lester. They hadn't bought sports cars; they had purchased airplanes.
"It's not a Ferrari," Chad told Ed. "It's not a Lamborghini. Let's bring our planes in and land them on the road outside Google."
They didn't. And anyone else who had splurged on a new toy left it at home. But things did change.
Bart, the advertising operations guy who had so eagerly anticipated the IPO, took to practicing his putting on the lawn outside the front door at every opportunity. People tucked stock tickers discretely into corners of their laptop screens, though Larry and Sergey threatened to fine anyone they caught doing it. It became harder to hold meetings because the conference rooms were occupied by Googlers huddled with people wearing polished shoes and toting expensive leather briefcases.
I was back at work and busy, but not as crazily busy as before. I had seniority plus a large group of product managers eager to pick up any slack. Cindy agreed to send me to China to learn the market and find a new Chinese name to replace our current brand there. While Yahoo's name translated as "elegant tiger," ours was rendered with characters that meant "old dog."*
In October, Cindy asked me to run the logistics for our first earnings call, in which we would reveal our quarterly results and take questions from brokers and analysts. It would be our first time talking directly to investors, and the desire for perfection was amped even higher than usual. Larry, Sergey, Eric, and George, our CFO, sat in a conference room with an armed guard outside. I was next door, looking through the window with Cindy, Jonathan, and our operations and legal teams. There was a last-minute breakdown in communication with the outside investor-relations firm, but we established an instant messenger link and no one was the wiser. To the rest of the world the event came off flawlessly, keeping the focus on the reported numbers, which stunned the market. Google's stock shot up to almost two hundred dollars over the following week.
Also stunned were my colleagues, when, at a party at Zibbibos after the earnings call, Cindy announced she was leaving Google. I had seen it coming. In fact, I had entertained thoughts along the same line. It seemed as if we had come to the end of a long story, and I wasn't sure I wanted to begin a new one. Cindy said she would stay another two months and leave in January. I decided to wait at least that long to see what the future held.
Cindy had been my last and strongest ally in defending the role of branding that went beyond research, analytics, testing, and iteration—and now she was heading out the door. After her departure, I would report to the director of product marketing. He seemed very well-qualified for the job. He had earned degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, had worked as a business strategist for a consulting firm, and had been a VP of global product marketing for a major networking company. He was exactly what Google was looking for, and that meant I no longer was.
Three weeks after Cindy left, the director