I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [9]
"What's the most effective barrier to entry?"
"What's more important: product differentiation or promotion?"
"How does the strategy change if the price is zero?"
He seemed to be paying attention, and I began enjoying myself. We were developing a special rapport! Clearly, he wanted to hear what I had to say and valued my opinions. Later I found out that Sergey did this with everyone he interviewed. An hour wasted with an unqualified candidate wasn't a total loss if he gained insight into something new.
The light was fading by the time I finished, and Sergey invited me to join the staff for dinner, which was being brought into a small kitchen across from the conference room. A crowd of hungry engineers bounced from platter to platter with chopsticks picking at a large selection of sushi.
"We just hired a chef, so this is a temporary setup," Sergey confided. "And we've got a couple of massage therapists coming in as well."
A warning light flashed in my head. This was the guy who didn't think there should be a marketing budget, and he had hired a chef and dual massage therapists? But then I saw the platters of fatty tuna and shrimp and salmon and yellowtail. I grabbed some chopsticks and began loading my plate. Concerns about a business plan and revenue streams and organizational structure faded away. Google met most of my requirements. It offered at least the appearance of superior Internet-related technology, some eccentric genius types, funding that should last at least a year, and a fun consumer brand that I could help develop. And sushi. I could always bail for the next startup or get my old job back when Google ran out of money. In the meantime, I thought, I'll eat well and maybe learn something useful.
Two weeks later, on November 29, 1999, I started work as Google's online brand manager.
Day the First
On my first day, I showed up before nine to make sure I gave a good initial impression to my new teammates. My khakis were clean, my polo shirt wrinkle free. I'm not sure the three or four Googlers who straggled in before ten in their shorts, sandals, and Google t-shirts really noticed. It turns out that engineers prefer to phase-shift their work schedules and start after the morning rush hour is well past. It's more efficient to get to work when traffic is light and to go home when everyone else is already asleep. And anything that needs to be ironed is automatically on the losing end of a cost-benefit analysis. Efficiency, I would learn very quickly, is valued highly among those who live to make things work better.
The office space was even more Spartan in the daytime than it had appeared during my evening interview. One large room held a dozen desks made of wooden doors mounted on metal sawhorses. There were small offices scattered around the perimeter, each occupied by at least two workstations sporting large-screen monitors. Many of the screensavers displayed the raining green English and Japanese characters popularized by The Matrix. A single bookshelf crammed with programming books was tucked into a corner. I felt as if a crew of small-parts assemblers might show up any minute, cover the tables with soldering guns and pieces of metal, and begin making toasters or robot dogs or locking mechanisms for seat belts. Generically utilitarian would be a generous description.
Google was leasing the top floor of a two-story building and had originally occupied only half of the available area. The technical staff were all tucked into that space because the engineers were literally the core of the company. Great things would come from packing them tightly together so that ideas bounced into one another, colliding and recombining in new, more potent ways.
My new space was in "the annex," the other half of the floor. It was completely raw: cables draped from the ceiling above an uncarpeted concrete floor in a wide-open space interrupted only by cement pillars and, oddly enough, a disco ball