Richard L. Brandt - The Google Guys: Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

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Table of Contents

PORTFOLIO/PENGUIN

THE GOOGLE GUYS

Richard L. Brandt is an award-winning journalist who has written about Silicon Valley for two decades, including fourteen years as a technology correspondent for BusinessWeek. He is also a consultant to entrepreneurial companies. The author of the blog Entrepreneur Watch and the book Capital Instincts, he lives in San Francisco.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Kim and Leila Brandt for their patience and support over my preoccupation with this book, which took substantial time away from them. Also, Shel Israel for helping me get started; my agent, Al Zuckerman, who has supported me far beyond the level I had any right to expect; and my editor, Jeffrey Krames, for taking a chance on me and doing so much to support me. In addition, Mark Powelson provided me with substantial research, and Kim Girard and Andrea Orr helped out enormously with early original reporting in 2004, several years before this book came together in its current form. Finally, thanks to everyone at the Progressive Grounds Caf in San Francisco, where most of this book was written, for keeping me supplied with great lattes.

Introduction

The Worlds Librarians

Good luck. Ive been trying to do that for some years.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt after being told the title of this book

The worlds first great library was the Great Library of Alexandria. It was created by Ptolemy I, a childhood friend of Alexander the Great and a general in his army. Ptolemy inherited rule of Egyptwhich the army had conqueredafter Alexanders death in 323 B.C. Ptolemy made the small, backwater town at the mouth of the Nile, named after the great conqueror, his new capital. By creating the library, somewhere around 300 B.C., he turned his city into a thriving center of intellectual thought envied by the world. It reigned as the greatest library in the world for three hundred years.

Ptolemys goal was to collect all the written works in the world and put them in one place. By the time the library was destroyed, it was said to contain more than five hundred thousand papyrus scrolls, collected over three hundred years. The library played a critical role in the Hellenistic Age, the period during which Greek culture spread into much of civilized Europe, Africa, and Asia. Probably no other library has had such influence on cultures and knowledgeuntil the great library of the Internet was created more than two thousand years later.

The Internets librarians sit today in a tidy campuslike business complex in Mountain View, California, the epicenter of Silicon Valley. Its a campus of modern steel, concrete, and glass structures interlaced with trees, gardens, walkways, and artificial ponds and streams, where people travel by bicycle, by scooter, and on foot amongor insidethe buildings. These librarians are a universe away from the gray-haired ladies with glasses dangling from chains around their necks and an incredible knowledge of the Dewey decimal system of many childhood memories. This, after all, is the electronics age.

Google Inc., a thriving corporation teeming with youthful and smart computer scientists and an incredible knowledge of the Internet, has become the de facto head librarian of the worlds information; the entity that guides us through the labyrinthine web of online information, philosophy, entertainment, opinion, debate, slander, pornography, art, and worthless blather that the geeks and executives of the Internet like to lump into the single category of content.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not create the Internet (although they now employ one of its key architects, Vint Cerf). But if anybody embodies the soul of the worlds head librarian, its the brainy pair of Larry and Sergey. They created the heart of Googles philosophy, its business tactics, and the ethos behind all major issuesfrom censorship to user privacy to entering new markets and trying to change the business tactics of existing corporations.

Google Is Ethical

Theyre unlikely business moguls. Larry is the more socially awkward of the pair. Heavily eyebrowed, thick-lipped, with a perpetual five oclock shadow and conservatively cut black hair always in need of a comb, he rarely volunteers to answer questions unless specifically asked to address them. When he does, its with a methodical intonation that sounds like a baritone version of Kermit the Frog. Sergey is also shy with outsiders, but more poised, with a piercing stare and curly brown hair piled on top of his head as though its unable to settle down. They work together on all major company decisions, from ethical issues to product design, usually in meetings that can be brutally taxing. But Larry, as president of Products, is the primary thinker about the companys future direction, and weighs in heavily on key hiring decisions. Sergey, a mathematical wizard and president of Technology, is the arbiter of Googles technological approach and shows deep interest in the companys moral stance.

Facing questions from shareholders and the press at a recent corporate annual meeting, Larry sat stiffly in his chair, straight-backed in a blue dress shirt and brown slacks, his hands on his knees, one of them holding a microphone as if he didnt know quite what to do with it. Sergey was more relaxed in a brown T-shirt and faded jeans. He sat comfortably with his forearms resting on his legs, looking over the crowd with an air of intelligent and confident interest, more willing to address sensitive topics than one would expect from such an intensely private entrepreneur.

At this meeting, Amnesty International had presented two proposals, demanding that shareholders require the company to set up a human rights committee to examine its practices in China, with the aim of limiting censorship there. Management felt that this was already being done, and rejected the proposal. But in a show of solidarity with those who have concerns about the issue, Sergey decided to abstain from voting his shares, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with it. True, it was a largely empty gesture, since the board and management had plenty of votes to reject it, but he wanted to demonstrate an acknowledgment of the difficulty of the issue. Larry and CEO Eric Schmidt voted against the proposal.

I asked Sergey why he abstained, and he explained that he was sympathetic to the cause and agreed with the proposals in spirit. Directionally, the two proposals are correct, he said. I think there is certainly room for us to have a group of independent people in Google who meet regularly to discuss these questions, he said. But he also said he was proud of Googles actions in China, where he felt the companys record was better than that of its competitors.

Google Uses New Business Tactics

Its just one of many issues that have focused the spotlight on Googles ethical stance since the company was founded in late 1998 by these two Stanford University computer science graduate students. Google came out of a project that only a computer scientist could love: developing technology to search through large electronic databases of published research papers. Instead, they came upon a much greater solutiona better way to search through the giant morass of data that is the Internetand ended up turning their technology into one of the biggest, most influential companies in technology today.

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