In 1999, Douglas Edwards became the brand manager of an internet startup called Google. Now he reveals the hidden cost of the online gold rush
At 40, Douglas Edwards, a marketing executive at the San Jose Mercury News, believed he might be due a midlife crisis. What he got instead, he says, looking back, was a rebirth. Like all second comings, there was an element of the miraculous in this one. The Mercury News billed itself as the newspaper of Silicon Valley and since this was the late 1990s that news was mostly concerned with the gold rush of internet startups. Edwards had a front-row seat for much of this excitement and felt its pull.
He wanted, he recalls, "to get closer to the real internet; close enough to grab the cable and feel the hum of millions of people communicating in the global hive". He scoured the small ads for ways in, "for leads on the next Yahoo, a business I had short-sightedly predicted would be a flash in the pan". In a meeting one day, a colleague mentioned a small firm on his client list that Edwards might cultivate.
"This Google," he asked the colleague, "what do they make?"
"Internet search."
"Search? Ha. Good luck with that," Edwards said and lost interest.
A few months later, however, he was in an office in a beige building in Silicon Valley being interviewed by a young man called Sergey Brin, who was wearing roller hockey gear and asking him to "tell me something complicated that I don't already know". Edwards thought about telling Brin how to change a nappy, but instead winged an answer about the "general theory of marketing" that lasted for 10 minutes, while his interviewer listened and bounced a rubber ball. Something Edwards said must have computed, however. He got the job and became Google's employee number 59: brand manager. Edwards figured at the time that this Google might only last six months, but at least, going into the new digital millennium, it might be fun and he'd have a line of tech credibility on his CV to add to the 20 years of experience in the dead tree news business.
In the event, Edwards lasted five and a half years at Google. He, and the 58 employees before him, became richer and more successful in those years than any of them (with the possible exceptions of the infinitely confident Sergey Brin and his co-founder, Larry Page) could wildly have imagined. The brand that Edwards managed – which not so long before his arrival had been called "BackRub" – became in that short time one of the most recognisable (and loved) brands in the world.
Edwards's memoir of those years, not surprisingly, takes as its title the adventurous tagline from the original Google search page: "I'm feeling lucky". Speaking to Edwards now from his home in California, I wonder if he can yet believe all that luck?
"Not in any rational way," he says. "But outrageous fortune was sort of background radiation in that part of California at that moment. I knew friends who had become very quickly successful. Did I think it would happen to me? No. But it wasn't quite beyond the bounds of possibility."
When he first came to Google, he suggests, he thought they had employed him because he could bring a little bit of grownup rigour to the young organisation; he thought they might want to tap into his knowledge of how they should build their company. He was quickly disabused of that idea. Organisational rigour, or hierarchy, was the last thing Brin and Page wanted. Rather, Edwards was required to forget all he knew about marketing and start with a blank page. A blank search page.
From the beginning, Google demanded the total immersion of the true believer. All the successful startups in that period had this cultish quality, Edwards suggests: Yahoo, Netscape and Amazon were all run on charismatic lines, "but at Google I think it was perhaps a bit more intense than that". As a marketing person, he came to feel he embodied the brand in some way. "Everything I owned for a while had the Google logo: umbrellas, towels, T-shirts, boxer shorts… it was on every pen I picked up and every piece of paper. Google did, in some ways, take over my sense of who I was. And it was worse for some of the other people who had gone there straight from college."
Edwards talked to a friend recently who is still at the company, another who got in early, feeling lucky. The friend could easily retire now and spend the rest of his life travelling the world on a yacht, Edwards suggests, but he doesn't seem able to leave. When Edwards asked him why, the friend came up with a couple of reasons: "One was he was interested in technology and there is no company that has better tools, better data sets, than this one. And the other reason was this: he was afraid to leave. Google was the only job he'd known and he wasn't sure what else he would do. He was scared of not being there."
A lot of that institutional attachment was rooted in those early years at the company, described evocatively in Edwards's book, when everything seemed to be new and the world felt like it was waiting to be Googled. Most of the early adopters who have now left the company have, Edwards suggests, tried to replicate that feeling ever since, as venture capitalists. "They want to recapture that lightning in a bottle," he says, "by starting new companies."
Some of them have been successful, by which he means they have started companies that have been bought by Google or Facebook. Once was enough, though, for Edwards, who spends some of his time now with not-for-profit organisations, and the rest with his family, who didn't see too much of him while he was employee number 59.
One of the things that comes across most clearly in his book is the sense that Page and Brin never doubted the eventual dominance of their search algorithm. They were driven, it seems, by a rare combination of logic and vision.
"They believed in their ideas so strongly, in part because they were such good ideas," Edwards suggests. "I'd identify Larry as the visionary; he was always thinking: where will this be 20 years down the road?"
If there were blind spots – Google's failure to see the importance of social networks, for example – then they were rooted in Page's personality: "Larry is not a guy you can imagine sitting around in the evening updating his Facebook status," Edwards suggests, "so he just didn't see that."
Likewise, Brin and Page clearly hated the idea of advertising: they believed good ideas would sell themselves. They were also smart enough, Edwards shows, to let the people who did believe in advertising get on with it. "It wasn't a top-down kind of company."
If there was a weakness ingrained in that early DNA, Edwards suggests, it was that Brin and Page relied heavily on their engineering genius as a solution to all problems. While he was at the company, Edwards realised the problem was that "Google was full of rational people, but unfortunately the rest of the world was not".
In the early days, these issues were not so magnified. "When Google started, our obstacles were mostly other corporations – Yahoo or whoever. Those obstacles could be overcome with superior technology. But when the obstacle is, say, China, it is a different order of challenge. I think they have now understood that there are limits to where the application of cleverness can get you, some problems that technology cannot solve."
Edwards tells me there was a story that Sergey Brin had gone to Washington quite early on "and tried just to walk into the Capitol building and meet Congress people, because he was Sergey Brin and why wouldn't they want to see him? They kept him waiting and waiting. That was quite formative. So now Google has a massive lobbying presence, donates to both [US political] parties and is beginning to resemble Microsoft in its attitude to the political process."
The difference Edwards made, he believes, was to humanise this rationality a little, to always remember that their users were people, not programmers. The most radical branding idea – to change the logo on an almost daily basis – was not his but Brin's. But Edwards likes at least to think his voice softened some of the sharp edges that then characterised most technology companies, "and allowed Google to move much further along a path of trust with users than, say, Microsoft".
His book, and recollections, can be divided into the before and after of Google's flotation on the stock market in 2004. Before was still a time of innocence; after, the money was hard to ignore. On the night before the IPO (Initial Public Offering), Google engineers were warned that if any of them turned up the following morning in a Ferrari it would be remodelled with a baseball bat. In the event, a couple of them went out and bought aeroplanes. Because they could.
"They were all actually very humble guys," Edwards says. "And people went to great pains not to show they were a millionaire or a billionaire at work. But it does ultimately change the culture of the company. One of the people in the book did not want me to mention his name, because he didn't want people to know how long he had actually been there, that he was one of the first. He didn't want to be treated as a pre‑IPO Googler."
One of the questions Edwards is asked most often in Silicon Valley, if he says he worked at Google, is: "What was your badge number?" That way, people can work out pretty much what he made. Though he had been there near the start, however, he was one of those who felt able to walk away. The money made things a little more serious, inevitably.
"My boss left at the end of 2004," he says. "She and I were very simpatico, but after she had gone it became clear that it was becoming the kind of bureaucracy that I had gone there to escape. It was becoming very metrics-driven: you had your place on the org chart and you had to achieve this or that measure to get to the next level. It didn't seem so much fun."
When he logs on to Google these days, he says, it is not quite the same as in the old days. But it is still with a sense of belief that "smart people, motivated to make things better, can do almost anything". Edwards should know; he has witnessed a miracle first hand and lived to tell the tale.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/31/google-douglas-edwards-tim-adams
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