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In reality, if you weren't an engineer, your first directive was to avoid impeding the progress of those who were. I'm not a technical guy. No one at Google ever said, "Hey, let's ask Doug!" when the flux capacitor hiccupped. But you couldn't work at Google without learning something new every day, even if you weren't trying to. Most engineers opened up about their work when I sat next to them at lunch, and generally they didn't mind using little baby-English words to explain things to me. Given the pressure, though, the engineers were biased toward being productive rather than talking about their productivity. It was a "Don't talk. Do." kind of culture, which made communication about our technical achievements erratic.

For example, I ran our weekly TGIF meeting for a while. TGIF was an all-company affair at which Larry and Sergey recounted the wins of the previous week as we sipped beer and chewed food on skewers. The engineers were so reluctant to report what they had done that Sergey got annoyed because he ran out of things to talk about.

"You must have at least three hundred people," he said to an engineering manager one Friday. "So over the course of a week, that makes six man-years. If this were the list of my accomplishments after six years of work, I would be pretty embarrassed."

Communication issues appear as a recurring motif in the pages to come: issues between engineering and marketing and issues between Larry and Sergey and everyone else. You'll recognize them when you see them.

So there you have it: the overview I didn't have that would have helped me understand something, at least, about the challenges that lay ahead for Google and for me. I still wouldn't have known our business strategy or how we would pay for all the engineers and hardware we needed. I still wouldn't have been prepared for Google's idiosyncratic rules of management, the atmosphere of constant pressure, or the environment that incubated extremism. But at least I'd have recognized which laws of physics applied—most of the time.

You're now better prepared than I was to undertake the Google adventure, which began for me in late 1999, a year after I crossed into my forties. I was due for a mid-life crisis, but what I got was a rebirth.

PART I

YOU ARE ONE OF US

I did things my way.

It was not the Google way.

One of us would change.

Chapter 1

From Whence I Came

I WAS NOT A young Turk. I was not a hotshot bred-for-success type who blew through business school, swung a gig at a consulting firm, and then leapt into a great management slot at a groundbreaking new tech company just as it went platinum. I had no desire to be that guy. You can tell, because I majored in English. I drifted through college without set plans for life after graduation and ended up in a series of short-term marketing roles until 1992, when I landed at the San Jose Mercury News (a.k.a. "The Merc"). I was thirty-four years old and ready to settle into something with a tinge of permanence.

"There's another baby on the way," my wife, Kristen, reminded me, "and he's going to need new shoes."

Seven years went by. It was 1999 and I was now forty-one. I had a steady paycheck and a third child, and I was set for life in a big, rock-solid company with a 150-year history and a handle on the future—but instead of hunkering down, I quit my job to join a startup with no revenue and no discernible business plan. What was I thinking? Why would I volunteer to take a twenty-five-thousand-dollar salary cut and a less impressive title to be with a bunch of college kids playacting at creating a company?

It seemed logical at the time, but only because logic at the time was warped and twisted by the expanding dot-com bubble.

Managing marketing and then online product development at the Merc ("The Newspaper of Silicon Valley") had given me a great view of the Internet explosion taking place outside our walls. Jerry Ceppos, the paper's executive editor, called it "the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance, happening right in our backyard." The region was rife with