I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [28]
Kristen came away more convinced than ever that I had traded our security for some fly-by-night startup that was halfway to shutting down. The ride home was quiet as the kids went offline in the back seat of the Taurus.
"They seem ... nice," Kristen said, "but do they know what they're doing? It feels kind of disorganized."
"I'm sure things will settle down over time," I murmured over the kids' snores. "They're still putting the company together, so it's a little rough around the edges. It's really not as bad as it looks."
The chaos had already begun to feel normal to me: the jumble of toys, tools, and technology, the roaming dogs dodging electric scooters zipping through the corridors, the micro-kitchen overflowing with free food. I was beginning to see that every aspect of Google's office space had a purpose.
George Salah left Oracle to become Google's facilities manager in 1999 after bonding with Larry and Sergey during a roller hockey game. ("They were much better than I expected for a bunch of engineers," he admitted.) Oracle was an enormously successful international company, so applying their best practices made perfect sense for a young startup. "At Oracle," George noted, "there were standards that I could pull out and say, 'This is what we need to do in Portland.' I said to Larry and Sergey, 'I don't want to re-create the wheel every time. Are you okay with me creating a set of standards?' They looked at me like I was crazy."
"Absolutely not!" the founders declared. "We don't want to have anything to do with standards. We don't want anything 'standard.'"
"I think that was about the time I began to go bald," George told me, running a hand over his naked pate. "They wanted to be completely different from any company that had come before them. To optimize in every way, shape, and form. I had to throw out everything I had learned in my career and then find vendors and contractors and architects who could begin to understand what the founders wanted—to create the best workplace they possibly could. Not for the sake of aesthetics. It was always function over form."
My colleagues and I, too, were forbidden to do things "the normal and accepted way." As Cindy put it, "Larry and Sergey fundamentally rejected any type of template approaches to marketing Google. At every other company I worked at, when you met with the media you had a set of messages, backed up by a PowerPoint presentation and a leave-behind. You had media training and were prepared with a pat response for any question. Larry and Sergey hated the idea, refused to stick to manufactured messages, did not use presentations, and talked about what they wanted to talk about. The media loved them for it."
My offline marketing colleague Shari was less enamored with our founders' idiosyncratic approach. She hammered Sergey to pay for market research and implored him to bring on an outside agency to develop a promotional campaign. "They just don't get the importance of mass marketing to build the brand," she complained. "They need to trust us to make marketing decisions and let us just do our jobs."
We all wrestled with Google's ambiguous structure. Who were the stakeholders? Who made the final call when we disagreed? Did Larry or Sergey need to approve everything we did? Apparently the company's focus on efficiency didn't extend to decision management.
Confusion about overstepping boundaries was bad enough, but there were worse scenarios than crossing an invisible line. Sometimes a founder put forth "a good idea."
"I have a good idea," Sergey informed Susan Wojcicki a couple of weeks after I started. "Why don't we take the marketing budget and