Ken Auletta - Googled - The End of the World as We Know It

At the recommendation of John Doerr, the Go Corporation hired Campbell as their CEO. The company was an early pioneer in pen computing-too early, it seemed, and when the market didn’t respond, Campbell unloaded the Go Corporation on AT amp;T, in 1993. He next became CEO of Intuit when Doerr suggested to founder Scott Cook that Campbell would be a great partner. Four years later, he moved up to chairman of the board. On the eve of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997, he asked Campbell to join his board.

Today Campbell serves as a mentor to some of the Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, from Marc Andreessen to Steve Jobs, whom he walks and talks with most weekends in Palo Alto, where they are neighbors. He estimates that he spends about 10 percent of his time on Apple business, about 35 percent on Intuit business, an equal amount at Google, about 10 percent as chairman of the board of Columbia University, and the remainder on assorted activities. He said he has donated his Google stock to the foundation he established to make charitable gifts to his hometown, among others. He donated money to his Homestead high school for a new stadium, scholarships in his father’s name for student athletes, a new gym named for his brother, who died of lung cancer in 2006, and Apple computers for the school. In the fall, he coaches sandlot football for eighth-graders from St. Joseph ’s School of the Sacred Heart in Atherton, California; in the spring, he coaches the eighth-grade girls in what’s called powder puff football.

He doesn’t have a lot of enemies. Marc Andreessen said of Campbell, “He’s been incredibly important in the Valley. Business is changing so quickly,” and less experienced entrepreneurs turn to Campbell for guidance. “Bill has been a model mentor. When he’s not in the room, he’s still there because people ask, ‘What would Bill say?’”

IN SCHMIDT AND CAMPBELL, Google had executives who could work with the founders and mentors the whole organization to work together. Now it needed to recruit senior executives. With an assist from Campbell, one of Schmidt’s initial targets was Sheryl Sandberg, who had just concluded her service as chief of staff to treasury secretary Lawrence Summers. The Clinton administration was winding down, and Sandberg, who was just thirty-one, was much in demand.

Sandberg has short dark hair, an angular face that is softened by a bright smile, and an engaging manner that makes strangers feel comfortable. She was the first of three children born to Adele and Joel Sandberg, she then a professor of English and other languages, he an ophthalmologist. The Sandbergs moved to Miami from Washington, D.C., when Sheryl was three, and although Sheryl was considered the smartest student in her public high school, she wasn’t a bookworm; from childhood, she has been popular. For college, she left Florida and went to Harvard and in her junior year there took a course from Lawrence Summers, then the rising star of the economics faculty. At the end of the semester he invited his five best students to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club and offered to serve as their senior thesis adviser. Sandberg accepted Summers’s offer-“He changed my life,” she said-and went on to win the John H. Williams Prize as the top graduating student in economics. When Summers was appointed chief economist at the World Bank, he brought her in as his special assistant.

Sandberg had a particular interest in health care, and in the early nineties went for a time with a team to India to work to alleviate leprosy and AIDS. Shaken by the poverty and suffering she witnessed, she vowed that she “was only going to do things that were good for the world.” She wanted to work in nonprofits or government but felt she required a broader education. She stayed at the World Bank two years before deciding she would go back to school. “I come from a Jewish family,” she laughed. “My dad’s a doctor. You had to have a graduate degree!”

Accepted at both Harvard’s law and business schools, she chose the latter, believing she needed a better understanding of how organizations worked. Between her first and second year she got married. Though the marriage lasted only a year, she graduated near the top of her class as both a Baker and a Ford scholar; with her former husband in Washington, D.C., she fled to the West Coast, where she joined McKinsey amp; Company in California, working on health care. McKinsey gave her no more joy than her marriage. “You don’t do anything,” she explained. “You just tell other people what to do.” She left after one year.

Summers was then deputy treasury secretary under Robert Rubin in the Clinton administration. The two had kept in contact and, again, he recruited her as his special assistant. For the next four and a half years, she worked for Summers; when he was elevated to treasury secretary she became his chief of staff. But when the second Clinton term ended in January 2001, she had to move on. Washington had taught her some surprising things. “Over the years,” she said, “I got less naive. I no longer thought, The private sector is bad. The public sector is good.” At Treasury, her most “exciting” meetings had been with technology companies. In America, she believed, “economic growth was all technology driven.” She decided she wanted “to go and be an operational executive in a tech company, a make-the-trains-run job.”

In early 2001, she moved out to San Francisco. Her sister lived there, and it was the technology capital of the world. She took time to clear her head, and in any case, with the dot-com bust still reverberating, it was a difficult time to seek a job. She signed up for cooking classes and relished her free time. She was offered an executive position by eBay, but she had her sights set on Google. “When I came out of the government, I wanted to do something that I believed in,” she told me. “I went to Google because Google had a higher mission, which is to make the world’s information freely available. But they weren’t offering me a job.”

Schmidt talked to her in the fall of 2001, and like all top applicants, she met with Brin and Page as well. When Schmidt offered her a position in late 2001, she was excited, but on closer inspection wasn’t sure it was a real job. “I was supposed to be a business unit general manager, but there were no business units, and therefore nothing to be managed,” she said. Schmidt “called me every week and said, ‘We’re profitable this week too!”’ Friends advised her to “work for a real company,” one that earned steady profits. “I met Eric and said there is no job. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re looking at this the wrong way. None of this matters. Growth matters. Get on a rocket ship and all things take care of themselves.’”

She was employee number 268. Her title was business unit general manager, even though, as she had noted, there was no business unit. There was also no CFO, which is perhaps why Eric Schmidt assigned her a top secret mission, kept even from their venture capitalists, to investigate a potential round of private financing to pump money into a four-year-old company that had yet to have a profitable year. Among the people Sandberg spoke with was Mary Meeker, the author of the seminal Internet report at Morgan Stanley. Their discussions, Meeker said, made her take greater notice of Google. “Before Sheryl arrived,” said Meeker, “they were so quiet and private. She was part of a push to bring people in.” Months and many meetings later, Sandberg made a PowerPoint presentation to the founders and Schmidt. The consensus of the people Sandberg consulted was that Google should be valued at one billion dollars. The consensus of the founders and Schmidt was that they would not pursue more investment capital because this valuation was, she said, “a total insult.”