I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [59]
"Think about it some more," he repeated infuriatingly.
Eventually I concluded that because Sergey was an engineer, he wanted our ads to depict an idealized world in which everything was optimized, including the people. I discovered that he disliked images that didn't fit a classical notion of beauty and thus could be seen as outliers in the data set of fully realized human potential. One trade ad for our advertising program included a picture of a sweaty sumo wrestler. Sergey wrinkled his nose when we showed it to him. "I don't think we should run ads with unattractive people in them. Our ads should always be aesthetically pleasing so people will think happy thoughts when they think of Google."
Devin Ivester, who left his own ad agency to join us as a creative-team leader,* remembers another such occasion, when he showed Sergey an ad with an exhausted man asleep on a couch, surrounded by books, notes, and papers. Sergey's response was, "No, we can't use that guy. He's ugly."
"You don't mean ugly, right?" Devin asked, somewhat taken aback.
"Well, no, but he's obviously not organized. He's just not a good person."
"How is he not a good person?"
"Well, look at him. He's just asleep on a couch."
"But if you read the headline, he's asleep because he's actually been working all night. He's almost tireless, but at some point he's had to give up."
"Well, obviously, he's disorganized then—if he can't keep up with his workload."
The lesson for Devin was that "Sergey had a very Disney-like idea of what we should show in our ads. It didn't have to be so real life. It was his idea of the perfect Googler and how people should be."
Perhaps because they viewed the world through a polarizing filter of "ideal" and "suboptimal" (or "good" and "evil," if you will) and were so confident about which position they occupied in this binary system, our founders displayed a fondness for hyperbolic vilification of those who disagreed with them. In almost every meeting, they would unleash a one-word imprecation to sum up any and all who stood in the way of their master plans.
"Bastards!" Sergey would mutter if a competitor signed a client we were pursuing.
"Bastards!" Larry would exclaim when a blogger raised concerns about user privacy.
"Bastards!" they would say about the press, the politicians, or the befuddled users who couldn't grasp the obvious superiority of the technology behind Google's products.
It was a little intimidating until you got used to it, but it wasn't long before "bastards" became corporate nomenclature for any individual or institution that didn't see things the Google way. Ratings services undercounted our traffic? Bastards! Hard-drive vendors refused to cut deals below wholesale cost? Bastards! It became so prevalent that someone proposed that Sergey's five-word acceptance speech for an online award should be "The Webbys are for bastards."
Things could have been worse. In fact, they could have been far worse.
I rarely heard profanity in the halls of the Googleplex, where raised voices raised eyebrows. People could be infuriating, but the approved response was to bludgeon them with facts until they succumbed to superior logic. Not that Larry and Sergey couldn't be caustic, even to each other. David Krane, who traveled extensively with the founders, sums up their relationship this way: "Those guys had a communications channel that was very direct, very open. When there was tension, it was when they were fighting over data. They would be downright rude to each other, confidently dismissing ideas as stupid or naive or calling each other bastards. But no one would pout."
It didn't take long to figure out that Larry and Sergey wanted to optimize the organization until it was as efficient as its technology. Anything that increased costs or reduced productivity added friction and slowed our progress. Ideally, we would churn out perfect