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

BUT THE SPEED OF GOOGLE’S ascent and its expansive commercial ambitions came to overshadow its noble ambitions. Google grew up very fast. In their first annual letter to shareholders, in 2004, Page and Brin wrote of Google: “If it were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer, and today it would have just finished the first grade.” Three years later, Search Engine Land ’s Danny Sullivan thought Google had prematurely entered its awkward teenage years. “The story of Google today is perhaps the adolescent period they are going through. How do they deal with the challenges of the growth they are going through? You are going to go through this wave of people leaving Google. They don’t need to work there anymore. And it’s not going to be fun, which will change the culture.”

“Google’s become a big company,” said Paul Buchheit, who left Google in 2006 to start Friendfeed.com. “It’s a very different environment.” As with most big companies, he said “priorities become based more on what looks good internally. You become distant from the users. When you get bigger, some engineer comes up with this crazy project, but he’s four or five layers from Larry. These layers in between are going to serve up all sorts of weird barriers.” There’s little incentive, he said, for individuals to innovate because the bureaucracy becomes cautious, overwhelmed with a terror “not to look dumb.” Asked for a more concrete example, the engineer who distilled Google into a powerfully simple slogan retreats to this sweeping analogy: “It’s an entire system. Think about the Soviet Union. They had lots of brilliant people. But there was an economic system there that encouraged certain kinds of behavior. They failed to innovate because the system was wrong.” Buchheit’s critique is echoed by Scott Heiferman, CEO and cofounder of the social network site Meetup.com, who has hired some former Googlers who left the company because it got too big. “Google did not invent YouTube. They tried and failed with Google Video. Google did not invent Facebook. They tried and failed with Orkut.” Aside from search, Heiferman said, “Google has actually failed at most things.”

Ask Google executives to describe their biggest future concern, and more often than not they say size. Growing too big and losing focus is Omid Kordestani’s foremost worry. At Netscape, he said, the company drifted away from founder Jim Clark’s vision of it as a company whose browser enabled Internet communication. “Suddenly we became more of an enterprise company than a Web company, even though we started the browser.” When Netscape rushed too quickly to issue an IPO in 1995, he said, pressure was on to generate more revenues, to perform on a very public stage for the press, to “focus on quarter to quarter” performance.

“For the last year my biggest worry was scaling the business,” Schmidt said in May 2007. “The problem is we’re growing so quickly. When you bring in people so quickly there’s always the possibility you’ll lose the formula. How do you manage engineering teams that are not on one campus? How do you manage across time zones? How do you keep the culture?”

IN ADDITION TO the natural concerns with rapid growth, critics both inside and outside Google believe the company has real management weaknesses. Paul Buchheit believes Google has succumbed to the disease of bigness that he says afflicts “every big company” and has become bureaucratic. There are many bottlenecks at Google. A former Google executive criticizes “micro management at the top,” and said a prime example is that the founders and Schmidt, or their designees, “have to sign off on each hire. That’s OK when you are hiring five new employees.” In 2007 and early 2008, Google was hiring 150 people per week. Because most decisions about new employees, deals, or policy “have to go to the top,” the process is slowed. Echoing a common thought, an executive who is a Google corporate ally and works closely with them said, “In many ways, it’s a very disorganized company. It looks to me like they are caught in this interesting conflict between a company that is overmanaged and undermanaged. They have a control mechanism at the top that has inordinate control. And at the same time, there is too much freedom.” He lists two complaints: “You can’t get answers out of Google when you want to schedule something,” so there are long waits. And “they are structured to allow way too many people to participate,” which results in endless meetings.

The founders get diverted by issues that should not require their attention. Eric Schmidt described a Monday management committee meeting in March 2008 during which they discussed how, under California labor laws, a review was necessary to determine whether their many massage therapists should become full-time employees. The significant plus was that they would receive full benefits. The significant minus was that tipping would be prohibited. The issue had first been raised at the TGIF meeting the previous Friday. The founders, massage regulars, were agitated. Schmidt, who said he has “never had a massage at Google, and never will,” was impatient, and blurted, “You guys are in charge of this.”

“‘We’re on it!’” they said.

That afternoon, Page and Brin scheduled another meeting to resolve the issue. “This is where the team really works well,” Schmidt explained. “I knew what I wanted, which was to get the hell out of the meeting! Larry and Sergey knew they had to get involved in an employee issue.” The founders resolved the issue by making them “variable part-time employees” and allowing tipping to be continued as long as it was reported. This incident can be viewed as an example of teamwork; it can also be seen as an example of micromanagement.

The founders’ zeal for efficiencies extends to the unusual way they manage their time. They used to share three assistants. No longer. They share an office on the second floor of Building 43 without secretaries or assistants to guard the entrance, keep them on schedule, or answer phones (which don’t ring anyway). A staircase whose banister is festooned with a large green kite leads from their regular office on the main level to a glassed loft where they work on desktop computers with oversized screens, circled by unpacked cartons on the floor, a large massage chair, and gym equipment so that Brin can stretch his cranky back. A helmeted spacesuit with the name Sergey Brin on a breast pouch is splayed on a hanging stand facing the offices below. (Brin has applied and left a $5 million deposit for one of the six seats on Space Adventures’ Soyuz spacecraft’s 2012 orbital trip.) Another staircase allows them to slip out of the building and to the parking lot where they daily leave their commuting vehicles, including two Priuses, two $109,000 Tesla Roadster electric sports cars from the company they’ve each invested in, and a couple of bicycles.

Asked why they have no assistants, Page gave a revealing answer. They do have an assistant “from time to time,” he said, but “the amount of time it takes me to actually schedule is not very high because of Google Calendar. Occasionally, I have to go back and forth with somebody, but usually they’ll meet when I want to meet anyway. It’s not like I have to negotiate very much.” He laughed, gently. “I’m not sure it would work for everybody, but for me it’s worked pretty well. Also, it’s actually allowed me to have more time. People are willing to ask an assistant: ‘Will Larry come and talk at this thing?’ But if they actually have to e-mail me about it, they think twice. It’s not that anybody in the company can’t e-mail me. It’s that they realize they shouldn’t be using my time that way. So the number of requests I’ve gotten has gone down, which is kind of nice.”