I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [29]
Our company was barely a year old at the time. We had no real revenue. Spending a million dollars of our investors' money on a land war in Asia would indeed be a revolutionary approach to growing market share.
Was Sergey serious? He was. How could I even begin to argue against such a bizarre suggestion? In past jobs, I might have disagreed with colleagues on using radio or TV or debated copy points and tone, but Sergey wasn't even speaking a language I understood.
Looking back a dozen years later, I kind of get Sergey's perspective. Saving lives was a better use of our budget than running ads, which just annoyed people to no effect—and were therefore evil. Why not make a big donation to a humanitarian cause and build awareness by doing good? It had all the classic elements of a Sergey solution: a wildly unconventional approach to a common problem, technology harnessed to improve the human condition, an international scope, and an expectation that the press could be used as a tool to forward our business goals.
Sergey didn't ask Shari or me what we thought of his idea. He knew we would have ridiculed it. Instead, he turned to Susan, one of the few marketers he trusted. She was a member of the inner circle from the University Avenue office, and Google had rented space in her house. Sergey had met her family (he'd later marry her sister), and Susan understood Sergey well enough not to dismiss his outlandish suggestions out of hand. Instead, she went to gather data, which in this case meant asking her mom, a teacher in Palo Alto. As an educator, Susan's mother carried authority with Sergey, and when she confessed to being confused about our plan to support a rebel army in Russia, it took some of the wind out of his sails.
He had a back-up plan, though. "What if we gave out free Google-branded condoms to high-school students?"
Sergey asked Shari and me to investigate other charitable promotions along these lines, and we dutifully did, but it wasn't lost on us that our opinions had only been sought as an afterthought. Susan was part of the marketing group, but Shari and I were supposedly managing it. We felt marginalized. Organizational ambiguity I could handle, but I needed sufficient gravity to show me which way was up and which was down.
We shouldn't do things the way we had in the past. We shouldn't copy other companies. We shouldn't expect to be informed about our strategy, if in fact there was one. We were independent actors, building a cohesive team of nonconformists. I thought I understood: I needed to identify problems and solve them. And so I did.
Chapter 5
Giving Process Its Due
JANUARY 2000. New year. New millennium. New me.
My first month had gotten off to a shaky start, but now I resolved to find solid ground in the primordial ooze of Google's early organization. My first step would be removing an obvious stumbling block between us and success: Google lacked process. We needed a clearly marked path for decision-making about everything from t-shirt design to what product categories we should enter. Fortunately, I was saturated in process implementation, having come from an organization with seven unions, dozens of editors, and an endless appetite for rumination and review. I knew how successful companies set goals, and I would bring the wisdom of the outside world to Google.
"Found a problem," I thought. "Now fix it."
I set up an interdepartmental meeting to address the need for project prioritization and resource allocation. The marketing and business development departments, the two mighty legs upon which the company's future stood, would collaborate to construct a stable platform for growth. My office mate Aydin wanted in. So did Shari and Susan and a couple of others on the business side.
At our first meeting, we brainstormed process structures. We analyzed the competition, our overall market position, and where the industry as a whole was headed. It was a good