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In fact, it wasn't even close. NewsHound was kicked to the curb like a mangy mutt. Larry and Sergey, even without looking at it, knew Google could build a better product in-house. Writing code was easy, so why spend money on some mongrel technology they'd only have to fix? What we really needed was the content, because building an international news organization would be complicated and expensive.

Had NewsHound been a disruptive technology that changed its industry, Larry and Sergey would have wanted not just the code but the Google-caliber engineers behind it. That way, Google would own their future breakthrough ideas as well as the ones they'd already developed. Larry and Sergey didn't like renting intelligence when they could buy it. There are only so many really smart people in the world. Why not collect them all?

Other initiatives I had shepherded also fell foul of the way Google did things. I had been at my job for more than a month and had just one project—the UI guidelines I had worked on with Karen White—that I could point to as an accomplishment. Of sorts.

My strikeouts were piling up. I prayed no one was watching the scoreboard.

Chapter 4

Marketing without "Marketing"

WHEN YOU'RE STARTING a company, it's pretty well understood what you need to do," Craig Silverstein assured me, speaking as an engineer and not a marketer. "You need to write tools to manage your workflow, you need to write a web server ... There are a lot fewer demands on your time, so it's really easy to crank out a lot of stuff when you're small."

The equivalent for a brand manager would be developing a logo, a tagline, some market positioning, and a plan for growing market share. We had a logo and seemed to be doing fine without a tagline, so I decided to focus on positioning and a marketing plan. I wasn't the first to put effort there.

Scott Epstein, the consultant Google hired in early 1999 to get marketing on track, succeeded in one important area—proving Larry and Sergey had the same distaste for traditional promotion that a vegan has for fatback. They rejected his plan to spend millions "building the brand," and when he slipped away into the night, they asked Cindy to shoulder responsibility for communications. As a PR person, Cindy saw the value in building an audience through word of mouth instead of spreading money like a layer of manure across the advertising wasteland. Google had a great story to tell, and public relations could harvest bushels of low-hanging fruit before we shoveled out cash for ads. All she needed was a little help.

"In late summer '99, we had such a hard time getting anyone to return our calls or to take us seriously," Cindy later recalled. "We did hire one firm, but we had to let them go because they only worked with clients that allowed them to invest, and Larry and Sergey said no.* That set us in the direction of going it alone—hire a small team, build institutional knowledge, and establish direct relationships with the media, analysts, and influencers." But in a classic chicken-and-egg conundrum, the media wouldn't talk to Google, because Google wasn't a company people were talking about.

"I contacted both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Merc," Cindy said. "I just wanted to get a relationship established. The Chron never called me back. I finally got hold of someone on the business desk at the Merc who told me they would not be covering Google because our Palo Alto office was 'too far north.'"

Growing by word of mouth suited Larry and Sergey's animosity toward advertising. They scoffed at profligate startups and their Superbowl spots, because TV ads lacked accountability. You could dump millions and not know if you had converted a single viewer into a user. Engineers rebelled against such inefficient excess in the name of "brand building."

"Brand is what's left over when you stop moving forward," was a sentiment engineer Matt Cutts heard expressed in a meeting with Larry and Sergey. It was