I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [24]
Striking Out
I didn't know anything about Salar Kamangar when he came to me in my first month at Google and asked for help. Someone mentioned he had been an intern. On the basis of that single fact, I underestimated him, as I suspect most people did. Larry and Sergey had hired Salar out of Stanford as Google's ninth employee in the spring of 1999. They tried him out as a temp for a couple of weeks, then put him on the payroll, where his undefined role as savant-at-large grew to encompass every new business challenge the company encountered, from hiring a controller to transferring the company's twenty-five-million-dollar nest egg from one bank to another. He was twenty-two at the time.
Salar was a Porsche packaged as a Dodge Dart. Dark haired with large, limpid brown eyes and a shy, infectious grin, he could have stood in for Sal Mineo in Rebel without a Cause, but despite his disarming demeanor, he argued his positions with passion, persuasiveness, and persistence. For a thin man, he was very hard to get around.
Salar's friends had an Internet company that mailed free postcards for users who typed in a message and a recipient's address. Their revenue came from selling ads to be printed on the cards.
"I signed us up for a free trial," Salar informed me. "Could you work with them to make it happen? We can promote it through the Google Friends newsletter."* The postcards seemed like a strange way to market Google, and I wasn't happy that a marketing decision was being made by someone who was not in our department—by someone, in fact, who didn't seem to have a department. I didn't want to be overly negative about Salar's idea, though, so I agreed to give it a shot.
Shari suggested we send it out to a professional designer. "Anything that goes to thirty thousand of our most loyal fans should have some serious thought put into it," she insisted. "Especially in the absence of any other Google branding out there."
"Hmmmm," I thought. "This is something I could do myself—a chance to knock an easy one out of the park." Besides, I'd already figured out that Larry and Sergey didn't like spending money on freelancers. I poured my soul into it. I spent hours searching for the perfect stock photos and writing lines that tenuously tied random images to Google products.
The company running the promotion died before any cards could be sent, and I had nothing to show for my efforts but a collection of strained puns. I kicked myself for having made such a marginal project a priority. There must have been more meaningful things to do. Why was I finding it so hard to get into gear?
I felt a strange paralysis induced by infinite possibilities. How many times could I rearrange my desk and make to-do lists? I looked for something familiar to grab onto. My old employer, Knight Ridder, announced they were killing off their online clipping service, NewsHound. Google could snap up the technology, improve it, rebrand it, and relaunch it. A news-alert system seemed like a good fit for Google, since we appeared to be all about providing information to people. I sent a proposal to Larry and Sergey, who thought it would be worth looking into and asked me to set up a meeting. That was more like it—single-handedly bridging the divide between old and new media.
"What exactly would we be buying?" Sergey asked a couple of days before the meeting was to happen.
"We'd be buying their filtering technology," I answered. "We'd have to negotiate separately for the actual news feeds."
"Oh," said Larry. "That's not very interesting."
"Yeah," Sergey agreed. "The news feeds are the interesting part. I'd rather not meet to talk about the other stuff. Let Salar take a look at it and see if it's worth going after the data."
I swung my attention to Salar and tried to salvage something of the original proposal. Sergey wanted news in our index; surely we could work something out? Salar was noncommittal.