I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [61]
Two weeks later the dot-com fever broke and the real estate frenzy passed like a kidney stone. Suddenly everything was fluid. George sublet space in that same building for $3.50 per square foot, and a year later he leased a completely furnished building nearby for forty-five cents a square foot.
It became a pattern. Just at the brink of disastrous overcrowding—or perhaps a few weeks after—George acquired more space at fire-sale prices and the Pacific Islanders reappeared with hammers and rails. Google swallowed every adjacent building on the Pac-Man path leading straight to the SGI complex. Three years later, in 2003, we gobbled that too.
Whenever Google expanded, new cubicle configurations appeared. There were half-height cubes, three-quarter-height cubes, cubes with cut-out pass-through windows, and cube suites with courtyards for couches or dogs. Larry and Sergey wanted to optimize the tradeoff between productivity and rent. What would happen if you put three people in a space designed for two? How about five? How many interns could you line up along rickety tables in a busy hallway? What if you made a fishbowl with glass walls all around and put four engineers inside it? Would they get more done? Less? Would ideas breed in captivity? They conducted the servers-and-corkboard experiment with bodies and fabric walls—rearranging the elements to yield the greatest computational output while generating the least amount of heat. Things could always be more efficient and cost less, in either time or money.
And that's where Gerald Aigner came in.
Gerald was the flaming sword of frugality wielded by the lords of Google—a cost-cutting obsidian blade with an Austrian accent and close-cropped blond hair. Blue-white sparks glinted from his angular glasses and lit his Jack Nicholson smile, and the air crackled when it squeezed into the furrows of his brow. Before meeting with Gerald, I checked my shoes for rubber soles and whispered thanks that I wasn't across a negotiating table from him. There are still parts manufacturers who shudder and blink uncontrollably at the invocation of his name. After doing a deal with Gerald, one vendor refused to talk to Google again unless we agreed to their price up front, without any discussion. "You're too hard to deal with and we won't make any money," they complained.
"Gerald is probably the most difficult person on the planet to please," George confirmed. "He wants everything for nothing, has to have it faster than it can be delivered, and it has to be to his exact specifications, which can be unrealistic and just bizarre."
Jeff Dean heard Gerald put competing vendors on the phone together and make them beat each other's bids, fight-club style, until only one was left standing—offering a price Gerald was willing to pay.
When Google needed data-center capacity in Ireland, Gerald went to all three major facilities in Dublin and pitted them against one another to win the business. Who was most willing to undercut the competition to become Google's premier partner? Who was willing to sacrifice the most to win a foothold for future business? Only after he had browbeaten them all into deep concessions did he sign a contract—with each of them. He needed all the capacity he could buy, but there was no advantage in revealing that in advance.
"The man had a penchant for cheap," recalls hardware designer Will Whitted, who worked closely with Gerald. "I loved him dearly for that. Anytime you told him the cost of anything, it was too much. The guy made me absolutely nuts, but he was almost always right. Brilliant guy."
"This is ridiculous," Gerald said about the cost of the boxes encasing our servers. "We shouldn't pay three hundred dollars for a piece of sheet metal." He convinced Urs to get rid of the boxes and go with an open design based on the bread racks he had seen