I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [77]
In 2000, only a handful of people saw the value of pure search clearly, and many of them already worked at Google. Quietly, steadily, and without even a hint to their colleagues down the hall, the engineers were building a plan to share their vision of a perfect hammer with a much wider audience.
Because, they knew, the world was full of nails.
How Larry and Sergey Role
Larry and Sergey, for all their opacity and their antipathy toward traditional thinkers, were easy to approach and easy to like. That was fortunate, since once I had tossed them the keys to my future, they had slipped behind the wheel of my psyche and taken it careering over bumpy back roads and slick mountain switchbacks. My ego struggled to keep a grip. They were twenty-six years old, but not the first successful young people to pass through my career. At the Merc I had met with Elon Musk of Zip2, who sold his startup for $300 million at age twenty-eight before helping to found a new venture called PayPal. Successful young technology executives were the crabgrass of the Valley, popping up everywhere and self-confidently calling attention to their greenness as they choked out the existing paradigm in one field after another.
Annie, my boss at the Merc, was a decade younger than I was, yet she taught me how to respectfully disagree with superiors in the face of catastrophic decisions. I was sure Larry and Sergey would act diplomatically with their superiors—if they ever met any. Backers read a lack of deference to others among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as confidence and disapproved when one of our candidates seemed "too much in awe of authority." That observation was never made about our founders, who paid deference only to data.
As the progenitors of a golden goose that had sprung from their own minds, Larry and Sergey had no obligation to kowtow to anyone. They treated the Queen of England as an equal and Benazir Bhutto as a friend. When they wanted business advice, they called Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett. They spoke bluntly to industry leaders they felt weren't getting what was self-evident to them, chastised vendors, and ignored or badgered staff members who disagreed with their ideas, even if those staffers had more experience or more advanced degrees.* They weren't intentionally rude so much as constantly impatient to keep things moving along the path that sometimes only they could see.
Even before they had the funds to start a company, "the Google guys" antagonized potential investors with their aggressive style. They gave no quarter and left none on the table. They insisted that Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invest together or not at all, because it was to Google's advantage to have both of the Valley's premier VC firms backing them. Our founders set the terms of the valuation according to what they saw as the potential of the technology they had created, not according to the accumulated acumen of the men who had funded Yahoo, eBay, Sun, and Amazon. Neither Larry nor Sergey had been to business school or run a large corporation, but Larry had studied more than two hundred business books to prepare for his role running Google as a competitive entity. He trusted his own synthesis of what he had read as much as anything he might have picked up in a classroom.
Self-aggrandizement often accompanies a sense of personal infallibility, but Larry and Sergey rarely displayed signs of undue self-importance. They didn't scream at people or make grand pronouncements or believe the inflated claims about Google in the press. In fact, any hint of puffery in presentations would engender a rapid-fire request to "just get to the data."
They did have healthy egos, of course, and as their reputations grew apace with the company, they even joked about the enlarged magazine covers the PR department hung in the halls featuring their oversized portraits. Larry claimed