I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [97]
All in the Family
My part in the Google-Yahoo tango played out weeks prior to the actual announcement. Omid wanted to cozy up to Yahoo by buying advertising from them as a gesture of good faith, so I scheduled the hundred banner ads I had created to run on their site. Sergey insisted I get the best return on our investment, even though he knew the ultimate goal was fostering good will. He directed me to buy untargeted run-of-site ads because they were cheaper than Yahoo's premium-content channels and because they gave us branding exposure even if nobody clicked on them. Did I mention they were also cheaper?
Yahoo, too, wanted to get the most out of our overture of friendship and resisted when I tried to negotiate lower rates for our buy. It was a difficult conversation in which I had to reconcile Sergey's deal-making directive to maximize value with our larger diplomatic goal of making Yahoo happy. I didn't want to push too hard, yet I felt an obligation not to roll over and accept whatever Yahoo felt they could get away with charging us. No matter what I negotiated, I knew Sergey would think we were paying too much. Then I discovered another complicating factor. The Yahoo sales rep assigned our account was married to David Krane, who had just been hired as Google's PR manager.
David was not the only Google executive in a mixed marriage, that is, one with a spouse working at a potential competitor. He wasn't even the only employee in the marketing department who had married outside the faith.
Let me give you an example of how convoluted and semi-incestuous Silicon Valley gets. We used the company eGroups to mass-mail our Google Friends newsletter to users, because Larry's brother, Carl, was one of eGroups' founders. Larry had done the configuration for the original eGroups server himself, and for a while the company's computational heart had lived under his desk. The same week we announced our deal with Yahoo, Yahoo announced they were buying eGroups for $428 million (Yahoo has been very kind to the Page family). With the integration of eGroups into Yahoo Groups, we began experiencing problems with our newsletter, from formatting issues to administrative headaches. Luckily, one of the software engineers absorbed into Yahoo with eGroups also had a connection to Google marketing. He was Cindy's husband. When our situation was dire and normal channels of communication failed, Cindy's "special friend" could usually help us get our problems addressed.
Silicon Valley is a Petri dish filled with amoeba-like corporations absorbing and digesting smaller technology firms, only to find themselves absorbed or growing large enough to split off their own subsidiaries. Employers have a penchant for hiring from the same pool of candidates over and over again, so everyone ends up working with everyone else at some point, or at least working for the same companies. Job-hopping is encouraged—no, expected—since no one place could possibly be interesting and innovative enough for an entire career. That's why the question Sergey asked when he interviewed me for the job was not "Why do you want to leave the Mercury News?" but "Why did you wait so long?"
No wonder social networking took root here; we're one big interconnected family whose members are always happy to find out how we're related to one another. "He's a first employer once removed on the Intel side." "She used to be my assistant at Sun, but she left me for some hot new startup over in Cupertino." A surprising number of tech workers have friends and lovers with whom they share intimacy but not the details of their office lives.
Google was no more immune to the lure of fraternization within the building than it was to relationships that crossed competitive lines. There were romances. There were marriages. On occasion, there were affairs. My sense is that the number of these dalliances was not out of