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  1. Culture
1 August 2011updated 01 Jul 2021 5:45am

I’m Feeling Lucky: the Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

What was it like to know Larry and Sergey in the company's early days?

By Helen Lewis

I’m Feeling Lucky: the Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
Douglas Edwards
Allen Lane, 432pp, £20

Perhaps I’ve been seduced by The Social Network into thinking that the story of every tech start-up should be an epic struggle involving clashing egos and sullen geniuses. Office rivalries, marketing meetings and arguments about fonts are never going to have the same allure.

And so it was on page 28 of I’m Feeling Lucky that I realised Doug Edwards and I might have rather different opinions on what constitutes an exciting book about the early days of Google. Here is the paragraph that did it: “‘As of last night, Google’s result font has become sans-serif,’ engineer Marissa Mayer announced to the company at large. ‘We tested the change and Larry and I reviewed it with some other engineers who were here and offered opinions about it.'” A heated discussion ensues about the way in which the engineers — Google’s hyperkinetic worker bees — have once again forged forwards, ignoring Doug’s cooler head.

To be fair, I’m Feeling Lucky doesn’t aspire to be a warts-and-all portrayal of life at Google. Edwards clearly feels loyal to the company that rescued him from being a marketing manager at a struggling local newspaper, introduced him to a whiplash-smart set of geeks and made him a very rich man.

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The book covers the mid-section of Google’s ascent: Edwards joined as its 59th employee in 1999 and left six years later when the company went public, which made many of its staff instant millionaires. If there is an arc to the narrative — it sometimes feels more like a string of hard-fought battles, often against his bête noire, Marissa — it is the account of how Google “grew up”.

When Edwards went for his job interview, the company’s co-founder Sergey Brin, then 26, turned up wearing gym gear and inline skates. Another early employee, he records, was interviewed on Hallowe’en as “Sergey, attired in a full-size cow suit, absent-mindedly stroked his rubber udder”.

The office, or “Googleplex”, was similarly free and easy. There were free meals in the cramped staff canteen, free massages from on-site therapists and a notable absence of job titles and hierarchy. But over time, as Google won ever bigger contracts to supply search for the likes of Yahoo and AOL, the playfulness got squeezed to the margins. In 2001, Brin and his “twin” Larry Page, who had written Google’s original search algorithm together while still at Stanford University, took on a Wall Street-friendly heavy hitter, Eric Schmidt, to be their public face and to transmit their commands to the workforce. A painful reorganisation followed, which left many engineers nursing grievances (or redundancy notices).

As Edwards tells it, Google’s rise to world dominance was never seriously in jeopardy but there were missteps along the way. Remember Froogle? Few people do and it has now been rebranded as Google Product Search. Then there was Orkut, a prototype social network developed by one of the firm’s engineers in his “20 per cent” — the fifth of the week that workers were allowed to devote to pet projects. Conceived around the same time as Mark Zuckerberg was annoying the Winklevoss twins with a little website called the Facebook, Orkut was launched without a full workover by the company and users soon began to find ways to spam each other. It was big in Brazil and India but flopped everywhere else. (A similar fate awaited the company’s next stab at social media, Buzz, but that hasn’t stopped it having another go with Google+, this time throwing its full technical weight behind the project.)

Although Edwards rarely says so explicitly, it is clear that his relationship with Page and Brin became more distant as the years went on, which can give the disconcerting impression that there’s a better book happening somewhere just down the corridor. The co-founders are fascinating and elusive: you are left with the impression of two hugely talented workaholics, perpetually bemused that human behaviour isn’t as simple and easy to predict as their beloved algorithms. This shows in the debates over privacy. Even though Edwards left before the company ran into a storm over Street View (which stored people’s wifi network data), he weathered the outcry over targeted advertising and Gmail, which both involved using huge amounts of personal information in pursuit of revenue.

By the time the company was ready to go public, Edwards’s role had been marginalised and reduced to almost nothing. He decided to leave, had an exit interview “with an HR staffer I had never met before” and found himself at the supermarket a week later, realising that his newfound wealth meant he no longer had to buy whichever ice cream was on sale (he’s since set up a blog for “Xooglers” — ex-Googlers).

As marketing manager, Edwards was always against Google publicising its “Don’t be evil” motto, arguing that the words would be used as a stick with which to beat it every time it did something controversial. But at the end of the book, he insists that it isn’t the frightening behemoth its critics would like us to think. Google obsessives and marketers will want to read I’m Feeling Lucky to learn how an unorthodox company communicated with the world in its early years but there is too much emphasis on meetings and minutiae to make it appealing to general readers. With a heavy irony, what this book about the world’s best search engine needs is a better filtering system, to find the nuggets of interest amid the humdrum.

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