More nuggets from I’m Feeling Lucky to help us understand Sergey Brin better. On the relationship between Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Edwards quotes David Krane, then a senior member of the communications team: “Those guys had a communication channel that was very direct, very open. When there was tension, it was when they were fighting over data. They would be downright rude to each other, confidently dismissing ideas as stupid or naïve or calling each other bastards. But no one would pout.”



THEY SHOULD BE PAYING US
It didn’t take long for Douglas to realize that Larry and Sergey wanted Google ideally to churn out perfect products while incurring no expense. “That was impossible, of course, but it didn’t stop us from trying,” he writes.
Douglas said he learned that for the founders, the starting point for any negotiation would be the position, “they should pay us”. To the founders, winning a deep discount wasn’t a victory, wrote Douglas. “It was an admission of a failure to get something for free.”
Another core value at Google was to ‘never pay retail’. In the early months of 2000, this was thoroughly tested when an expanding Google wanted more space and Silicon Valley had nothing to offer at less than $8 per square foot. Despite his protestations, Google’s official office hunter George Salah was forced to put in a lowball offer of $6.45 per square foot by Larry and Sergey. The landlord screamed at George’s broker and raised the price to $8.25 per square feet, notes Edwards. As luck would have it for the Google founders, two weeks later the dotcom fever broke and the real estate market collapsed. Salah “sublet space in that same building for $3.5 per square foot, and a year later he leased a completely furnished building nearby for 45 cents a square foot”, writes Edwards. So the Google core value, after all, was based on sound logic.

GOOGLE’S GREATEST CORPORATE EXPENSE
At an all-hands meet one Friday, Sergey popped the question, “Do you know what’s our greatest corporate expense?”
Douglas remembers that everyone wanted to answer that one. Answers came in thick and fast like ‘health insurance’, ‘salaries’, ‘servers’, ‘electricity’, and even ‘Charlie’s grocery bills’. Sergey wasn’t impressed. “No,” he said solemnly, shaking his head, “opportunity cost.” He explained that products the company wasn’t launching and deals they weren’t doing threatened its economic stability more than any single line item in the budget.

(To be continued. Vignettes taken from the book I’m Feeling Lucky by Douglas Edwards. The first, second and third parts of this series can be accessed by clicking on the links)

More nuggets from I’m Feeling Lucky to help us understand Sergey Brin better. Douglas’ experience with running the first set of banner ads for Google made him realize how much data driven the company’s founders were. Google had barter arrangements with Netscape and Go2Net. So the marketing department needed to come up with banner ads. “How many can you have by tomorrow?” Sergey asked. “Why don’t you start with a 100.” Douglas threw himself at the task, roping in a copy writer and an artist. All the banners were critiqued. The comments from the founders never seemed to end, until one fine day, Sergey again said: “We should try a bunch of these out. And see how they perform. We are wasting time by not running them and getting the ultimate feedback — clickthroughs.

Eventually the ads began to run, and Douglas says the pressure on him seemed to ease as he started the practise of plugging in data about which ads were attracting more CTRs into a spreadsheet, and hand-delivering them to Larry and Sergey. He would pull ads which were not working, and replace them with new banners. “I became a convert to the power of data persuasiveness,” Douglas writes.

Google is now justly famous for A/B testing its headlines and design. Its popular Google Analytics tool, offered free to website owners, even features a fairly extensive A/B testing function.

HOW A/B TESTING BEGAN AT GOOGLE
Wired magazine ran an article on the origins of A/B testing at Google some time ago. The rotation of banner ads narrated above by Douglas Edwards is of course not included in the history of the evolution of A/B testing at the search giant. This is what the Wired article said about it:
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At Google — whose rise as a Silicon Valley powerhouse has done more than anything else to spread the A/B gospel over the past decade — engineers ran their first A/B test on February 27, 2000. They had often wondered whether the number of results the search engine displayed per page, which then (as now) defaulted to 10, was optimal for users. So they ran an experiment. To 0.1 percent of the search engine’s traffic, they presented 20 results per page; another 0.1 percent saw 25 results, and another, 30.

Due to a technical glitch, the experiment was a disaster. The pages viewed by the experimental groups loaded significantly slower than the control groups, causing the relevant metrics to tank. But that in itself yielded a critical insight — tenths of a second could make or break user satisfaction in a precisely quantifiable way. Soon Google tweaked its response times and allowed real A/B testing to blossom. In 2011 the company ran more than 7,000 A/B tests on its search algorithm. Amazon.com, Netflix, and eBay are also A/B addicts, constantly testing potential site changes on live (and unsuspecting) users.
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‘DON’T INVOLVE EVERYONE; IT’S A WASTE OF TIME’
The UI team was debating names and designs for the browser button, a piece of code that allowed users to add Google search links to their browsers, writes Douglas. The mailing list had swelled to 10. Sergey found it ridiculous. Instead of exhaustive user testing and internal deliberations, Sergey said Google should just put up the service and test it when they get a chance. “Don’t forget. We can change it at the drop of a hat,” he said. ‘Launch first, iterate later’ was Sergey’s perspective. Then he expounded his philosophy. “I don’t think we should have any meetings about a project like this,” he said, “or any group emails except the one to users announcing the launch. Having everyone involved in every issue is not a good use of anyone’s time.”

 (To be continued. Vignettes taken from the book I’m Feeling Lucky by Douglas Edwards)

We continue from where Douglas Edwards, the former director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google, left us in his book I’m Feeling Lucky. Remember, we are using these vignettes to understand the thought processes which drive Sergey Brin.

Let’s welcome George Salah into the narrative. He had left Oracle to become Google’s Facilities Manager after bonding with the founders at a roller hockey game. Oracle being a very successful company, Salah wanted to import best practices from there to the fledgling Google. Douglas quotes him as saying, “I said to Larry and Sergey, ‘I don’t want to recreate the wheel every time. Are you okay with me creating a set of standards?’ They looked at me like I was crazy.”

“Absolutely not!" the founders declared. "We don’t want to have anything to do with standards. We don’t want anything ‘standard’.”

“I think that was about the time I began to go bald,” George told me, says Douglas. Sergey and Larry wanted their company to be completely different. George threw out everything he had learned in his career, and set about finding vendors, contractors, and architects who understood what the Google founders wanted, and that was always function over form, writes Douglas.

The author notes that he and his colleagues in the marketing department too were forbidden to do things the “normal and accepted way”. He quotes one of his former colleagues saying, “Larry and Sergey hated the idea of template approaches to marketing. They refused to stick to manufactured messages, did not use presentations, and talked about what they wanted to talk about. The media loved them for it.”

A CURE FOR AIDS? NOT IMPOSSIBLE
Douglas continues. It seems once the founders came to know of marketing’s intent to dictate product plans to engineering. They threw a monkey wrench at it, he writes. Sergey eventually issued a company-wide manifesto listing Google’s top three priorities as “product excellence, user acquisition, and revenues”. It left a lot of questions unanswered, but Douglas writes that he eventually came to realize that the founders intended to “pick a path to the future based on their gut instinct”. An engineer by name Chad Lester marveled, “They had so much self-confidence that Sergey was convinced he personally could find a cure for AIDS.” Douglas noted that the VCs on the board, including storied names like John Doerr and Mike Moritz, didn’t have control and could do nothing beyond try and guide the founders.

NO BODY ODOR PLEASE
Larry and Sergey had appointed a VP for corporate marketing and put her in charge of PR and promotions, but not the development of products. The board wanted a different leader to build that organization —someone with technical savvy, but not an engineer. Douglas notes that Larry and Sergey reluctantly agreed to take a look around. The qualifications required? The right candidate would have to communicate with coders, execute quickly, and be very, very smart. And yes, smell nice too! Douglas writes that Sergey once rejected an applicant in part because “I thought he had kind of a bad body odor.”

 (To be continued. Vignettes taken from the book I’m Feeling Lucky by Douglas Edwards)

When Douglas Edwards, the former director of consumer marketing and brand management, landed at Google for a job interview, among the questions that Sergey Brin peppered him with, one stood out: “What’s your GPA?”

In his book, I’m Feeling Lucky, Douglas says that even after he was hired, the HR department kept pestering him for his transcripts and SAT scores. Indeed, having high academic records was once a pre-requisite for a Google hiring, a factor perhaps influenced by the views of the founders themselves, who were after all brilliant students.

As we have seen in a recent blog post, Google’s reliance on academic accomplishments seems to be a thing of the past.

One of the curve balls which Brin threw at Douglas during the hiring interview was when he offered him five minutes to explain something complicated that Brin didn’t already know. Douglas chose general theory of marketing. By the time Sergey came back, he had prepared stuff to answer 10 minutes of questions, but they were not of much use as he was forced to find answers on the spot to the questions Brin fired at him one after another. Later he found out that this was routine for Brin. An hour wasted with a candidate wasn’t considered a total loss if Brin could take away some new insights on a topic he didn’t know.

NO DIRECTORS IN A FLAT ORG
Douglas had applied for the post Marketing Director. Another individual by name Shari Fujii had applied for the same post advertised on the Google website. When they joined both found that Google didn’t seem to have such a post, and instead, the company preferred to address them as managers. “I shrugged my soldiers and swallowed my pride,” writes Douglas. Sergey reminded everyone constantly that titles aren’t important because Google wanted a flat organization with fewer levels and less of bureaucracy

NO GREAT CODERS
Apparently both Brin and Page were no great shakes as coders. Craig Silverstein, the first employee of Google, would say that he didn’t trust the founders as coders because he found a lot of bugs in their early code. He categorized them as research coders who were more interested in writing code that works than writing code that was maintainable. Jeff Dean, another engineer, told Douglas that the early Stanford version of Google had this quirk: when something unusual happened, it would print out an error message. It read, “Whoa, horsey!”

(To be continued. Vignettes taken from the book I’m Feeling Lucky by Douglas Edwards)