I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [75]
Shari didn't have as many options. She became increasingly frustrated with her inability to convince Larry and Sergey to spend money on offline customer acquisition. When she requested outside resources, the answer was "Why don't you do it yourself? It's not that hard." In Google's culture, when you ran into a wall, you built a ladder. If there was a moat beyond the wall, you made a boat. If there was a crocodile in the moat, you fed it one of your arms and used the other to paddle across. The takeaway was "Take responsibility. Do something."
So Shari did. She went shopping for an outside agency to create the offline promotion she had been planning. She didn't have much luck. "We were disappointed at how close-minded Larry and Sergey were," her first choice admonished her. "We don't trust Larry, so you'd have to pay us in advance."
Larry and Sergey didn't disguise their antipathy toward ad agencies and the industry to which they belonged. They were disgusted by the sea of self-congratulatory awards and the bad math and the pseudoscientific jargon used to proclaim advertising's effectiveness. Larry even hated the stiff black cardboard that agencies used to present creative campaigns—each concept perfectly center-mounted to convey greater gravitas. To Larry, a good idea was self-evident, even if scrawled on a wrinkled napkin in blotchy ballpoint. Ad agencies, he hinted, were full of bumbling simpletons and evil dissemblers.
When Shari located a promotion agency willing to take our account, she acted boldly. She signed a contract and put them to work. When Larry and Sergey found out, they made it clear that when they urged us to "do something," they meant "do something that doesn't cost Google money." And that wasn't the worst of it.
Google didn't acknowledge outside firms that served the company—not even for client references. As the company grew in size and stature, suppliers begged for permission to announce their ties to us, often offering steep discounts if they could just display Google's logo on their client lists. Almost always we said no. We spent valuable time evaluating vendors. Why spare our competitors the same hardship by tipping them off that we had found a company worthy of our business? It would be far better if our competition made its own choices, and, perhaps, chose badly.
That's why I was amazed to read in Advertising Age that we had signed an agency to handle our five-million-dollar promotion account. No one had authorized the article or known it was coming. The agency had taken the initiative to place it and to exaggerate the facts. It was not the kind of creative effort we wanted from them. All of Larry and Sergey's hot buttons were mashed at once—strongly and repeatedly—and Shari suddenly had a crisis on her hands.
I empathized with her and wanted to help, but there wasn't much I could do to sway our founders toward acceptance of our new partners. Shari would have to convince them on her own.
And the Winner Is ...
Each morning I scanned the press for signs that the tectonics of our industry had shifted overnight. Who had been acquired? Who had a new alliance? Whom did we need to fear? Sitting in my cube thumbing through the May 2000 issue of the magazine Upside,* I found an in-depth analysis of the search space. I scanned it eagerly to see how things were viewed from outside the Plex. Reading the article, I learned that our focus on search was outdated and our strategy was doomed.
"In the early days, search was the marquee item and major driver of traffic on our site," Excite's director of search told Upside, "...but now it is one of many services." Google just had search. Well, search and a directory. Did that constitute