Pod Insights The Vergecast Land of the Giants: The Google Empire About this episode Vergecast is on vacation this week, so instead we'll share an episode of Land of the Giants from our friends at Recode.
Land of the Giants is a podcast that explores the five biggest tech companies and their impact on our world, and this season is all about Google.
The episode we're sharing tells the story of how two grad school students with a unique way to search the internet launched a company that would become the gateway to the internet for the entire world.
In the rest of the season, Land of the Giants: The Google Empire will cover issues like Google’s relationship with the government, the origins of their antitrust troubles, and what their future may look like as they face off against Congress and the Biden Administration.
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Transcript 7,653 words · 19 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:45 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:30 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of taking the week off. My name is Dieter Bohn, and as you may have guessed, Neelai is off this week, and I was lucky enough to get ahold of a COVID-19 vaccine. I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and that was yesterday, which means that today I'm kind of feeling it a little bit. But there's very good news. Instead of listening to me do an elegy for LG phones that are no longer being made, I'm so sorry. Instead of that, our, a bunch of the other tech news that we are still going to get to next week, we have an episode from our friends over at Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's called Land of the Giant.
2:10 Speaker 01 The Google Empire and it's an entire season all about Google and how it turned into an empire. It's hosted by Shereen Ghaffari and Alex Kantrowitz and it's really good. You should definitely give it a listen. We are presenting the first episode here, which is all about the founding of Google. You might sort of know some of the stories, but there's a lot of really funny, interesting details here that you might not have heard before. The entire season runs through a bunch of different issues with Google from YouTube to the ad network to some very, very timely episodes about AI and ethics, because there's been a bunch of stuff in that of the news the last month or two. I was actually participating a little bit in some of the early development of this podcast, but I needed to back out and I'm really, really happy that instead of me, you've got Shereen and Alex.
2:53 Speaker 01 They've done an excellent job of the series and you can binge the entire thing. The last episode on DoubleClick just came out, so you can listen to the entire thing. But right here, right now, you can listen to the first episode and you can find the whole thing wherever you find your podcasts. So thanks so much for listening. We will be back next week to talk about a bunch of the tech news. We will talk about LG quitting the smartphone business. We want to talk about the new Sonos Rome Bluetooth speaker. I'm really interested in it. We'll probably talk about T-Mobile trying to do home internet over 5G and I have emotions about that, but not as many emotions as Dish, who is super pissed at T-Mobile for the shenanigans they're doing and keeping Dish from achieving its goals, maybe. Anyway, all of that, all the weird tracker news that happened this week, a bunch of that's coming next week on The Vergecast, but right here, right now, you can listen
3:37 Speaker 01 to the first episode of Land of the Giants.
3:41 Speaker 02 In 1999, Marissa Mayer was sitting in the most important interview of her life. It was at a startup called Google.
3:48 Speaker 03 That meeting was at their conference table in the main conference room at 165 University, which also happened to be a ping pong table.
3:57 Speaker 02 Meyer would go on to become one of the most prominent executives in Silicon Valley. From 2012 to 2017, she was CEO of Yahoo. But back in the late 90s, she was still a student at Stanford about to graduate with a master's in computer science and Google's co-founder Sergey Brin was not going easy on her.
4:16 Speaker 03 Sergey did all the talking and quizzed me intensely on a lot of different computer science topics, had me draw out like the graphing of K-means clustering and, and centroid and how to find the differences in, in the centers and things like that.
4:31 Speaker 02 Meyer was a star student, so she answered those questions no problem. But there was another interviewer in the room, and she noticed something was a little off with him.
4:40 Speaker 03 Larry seemed quiet and, truthfully, honestly, somewhat distracted.
4:45 Speaker 02 Larry Page, the other founder of Google. The pair wrapped the interview up early. They had something else on their minds.
4:51 Speaker 03 And they left the door open so I could kind of hear what was going on outside. And then I heard them call and say, OK, who's going with us for the Kleiner pitch?
5:00 Speaker 02 Kleiner is in Kleiner Perkins, the legendary venture capital firm.
5:04 Speaker 03 And I heard a lot of foot traffic heading out the door. And then Heather Carnes, the office manager, reappeared and said, "I'm sorry, Larry and Sergey had an important venture capitalist pitch this afternoon, and they had taken the majority of the company with them. So I think you're going to have to come back tomorrow."
5:29 Speaker 02 The guy who Larry and Sergey needed to impress at Kleiner Perkins was John Doerr. He was practically a Midas of the dot-com boom. Doerr led Kleiner's early investments in Netscape and Amazon, and now Google needed his golden touch.
5:43 Speaker 04 They had a 24-page pitch deck, which I still have a copy of.
5:51 Speaker 04 Here's the business model on page 14. We're going to do branded search on www.google.com. We'll do co-branded web search, and we'll do site search. I want to tell you, that's not a business model.
6:06 Speaker 02 For an investor like Doerr, that didn't matter. He thought Larry and Sergey were wicked smart and almost unrealistically ambitious.
6:12 Speaker 04 They had a vision for search and for information and the internet that was bigger than anyone I'd seen from any of the founders that I'd met.
6:24 Speaker 02 Because Google's founders wanted to organize all the world's information.
6:29 Speaker 04 They looked at the world and understood how it is and imagined a different and better world. And that they could get there. With technology.
6:38 Speaker 02 It's basically an industry cliche at this point for startups to say that they're using tech to change the world for the better. But Dora actually believed Larry and Sergey when they said it.
6:47 Speaker 04 So it was pretty easy for me in our first meeting to come to the conclusion that I wouldn't mind getting into trouble with these guys. That's the first question I always ask of founders, because in building a business, you're going to get in trouble in one form or another.
7:08 Speaker 02 I'm Shereen Ghaffari, senior reporter at Recode. I'll be hosting this season of Land of the Giants with my friend in big tech reporting, Alex Kantrowitz. Hey, Alex.
7:18 Speaker 05 Hey, Shereen.
7:19 Speaker 02 I've been covering Google for the past three years. I also grew up next door to its headquarters in Silicon Valley. So I've been hearing stories about what it's like to work at Google since I was playing handball in the playground at recess. I'm not kidding.
7:31 Speaker 05 I can't say my inside knowledge of Google goes quite as far back as yours, but I did write a book about big tech called Always Day One, and I cover the industry at a publication I founded called Big Technology. So there is something that has always stuck with me about Google. Of all the tech giants, we know that Apple's the richest, and Amazon is the most ruthless. Microsoft, of course, is the most important to enterprise, and Facebook is definitely the most controversial. But Google is the most powerful.
8:00 Speaker 02 Google is the filter through which we access the internet. If you're online today in most parts of the world, you're probably using Google. Sometimes it's obvious, like Gmail, Google Maps, or Google Search.
8:12 Speaker 05 But it's also subtle. So you might be visiting a random website that seems to have nothing to do with Google and still be interacting with it. Because beneath the surface, it's showing you Google ads run on a Google Chrome browser and powered by a Google Cloud server.
8:27 Speaker 02 Our lives are organized around these products, but we don't control how they work. Every decision Google makes, every tweak to its secretive algorithm, every little change to how it uses our personal data, every internal debate over company culture, all of that impacts billions of people. I mean, Google is so important that its name is the verb for looking something up online. And if a website doesn't show up in the first few pages of a Google search, it's almost like it doesn't even exist.
8:58 Speaker 02 That's how much power Google has.
9:00 Speaker 05 John Doerr must have sensed all this massive potential because even after that lackluster pitch back in 1999, Kleiner wrote Google a big old check for $11.8 million. As we all know, that was only the beginning.
9:14 Speaker 04 Not only did they build the best search engine, but they built the best advertising company, the best advertising network, Maps, Mail, Video, News. Any one of those would be a highly valued company. They did all that in their first five years, and it continues to this day.
9:31 Speaker 05 So, Google's ability to bundle all those hugely successful businesses into one giant company, that was good news for its investors. But it also created some of that trouble Doerr saw coming when Larry and Sergey were just getting started. It's been 20 years. Now, lots of people inside and outside Google are asking, is Google too big for its own good?
9:52 Speaker 02 And to get into that question, first, we have to understand what was driving the company in its early days. Unlike some other major tech companies I've covered, Google was idealistic and value-driven from day one. That's what's so unique about this company's story. The morality it proclaimed about its work, plus the naivete in its mission, would later become the company's biggest source of tension. So basically, to understand Google today, we need to know the people and ideas that shaped its beginnings. And one of those people was Terry Winograd. I mean, I think there was one article that referred to you as like the Yoda of Silicon Valley, and so...
10:27 Speaker 06 I think that was based on looks.
10:29 Speaker 02 Terry Winograd's being pretty humble here. He's downplaying the fact that he's advised some of the most successful founders in tech history. What is your secret?
10:40 Speaker 06 So, I have the same secret that the real estate agents always tell you. There's one thing that really makes it work: location, location, location.
10:50 Speaker 02 That location, Stanford University. Winograd started teaching computer science there in 1973, back when Silicon Valley was practically an apple orchard. He retired in 2012, but early in his tenure, he met one of his most famous mentees.
11:04 Speaker 06 I actually met Larry when he was seven years old.
11:07 Speaker 02 Winograd remembers meeting Larry as a kid when his father, who was a professor, visited Stanford. Both of Larry's parents were accomplished computer science researchers, so it was only natural that he would follow the same path. When Larry got to Stanford, he had a lot of ideas about what to research, though some of those interests sounded more like science fiction.
11:25 Speaker 06 I remember him coming in, talking about space tethers, which had no, you know, it wasn't computer science. It wasn't even practical and certainly still isn't, basically. But he was fascinated by the question of, could you get into space through a space tether? And that was just the kind of thinking he did, you know? Let's try it.
11:42 Speaker 02 Soon enough, Larry became friends with a fellow classmate who was game to humor his wild ideas, Sergey Brin. Sergey was also the child of accomplished academics. His parents emigrated to the US from the former Soviet Union when he was six. And like Larry, Sergey grew up going to Montessori schools. And he was a little wacky.
12:00 Speaker 06 I mostly thought of him as, you know, the guy who works with Larry.
12:04 Speaker 02 He was, he was kind of a character, it seems like. Like I read stories about him rollerblading through the halls and...
12:10 Speaker 06 That's both of them.
12:11 Speaker 02 Both of them.
12:12 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah. In spite of the signs up saying, no rollerblades allowed in the hallways, you know?
12:17 Speaker 02 What were they like back then? I mean, they were, they were these bright...
12:20 Speaker 06 Very bright and sort of cocky. You know, they very self-assured.
12:25 Speaker 02 When I talk to people who knew Larry and Sergey in their early days, their names mold into one. Larry and Sergey, or sometimes just Larry Sergey. It slips off the tongue. It shows just how connected they were once he started putting their minds together, even though they were also pretty different. Sergey was the more sociable one. He was naturally outgoing and quick to share his strong opinions on whatever subject he was talking about. Larry was more reserved, but equally confident.
12:50 Speaker 06 They were decently likable. I mean, especially because we're in a nerd department. But that wasn't what brought it together. It wasn't their human skills. It was really that they were smart and they were willing to try things.
13:03 Speaker 02 Like navigating the World Wide Web. This was back when the general population was just getting access to the internet. The volume of content online was exploding. Really, the web was as much of an unknown as space.
13:18 Speaker 05 And trying to find your way around that web in the mid 1990s was not pretty. Your best bet was to use the Yahoo Directory, which was literally a human-made list of websites, just like a cyber yellow pages. And if you did try a search engine, well, good luck.
13:32 Speaker 06 The way I used to describe it is you would type in your search, go get a cup of coffee, and come back and see what it found.
13:37 Speaker 05 Larry could do better than that. But first, he'd need to see how all the pages on the internet connected, what the network looked like, and how the sites were linked. To do that, you'd just have to download and index everything on the internet. Every single webpage. No big deal. This was just the kind of challenge Sergey couldn't resist. Winograd says the pair came to him to pitch their plan.
14:01 Speaker 06 Basically, I said, "No, you can't do all that." And they said, "Oh, yes, we can." And I said, "Well, go ahead and try."
14:08 Speaker 02 So Larry and Sergey started tapping into Stanford servers, and their map-the-web exercises ended up taking down the entire campus network.
14:15 Speaker 05 Freaking geniuses on rollerblades.
14:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, but the project was a success. Through that web crawl, Larry and Sergey discovered something: a new, elegant way to sort information online.
14:28 Speaker 02 To get to the genius of Larry and Sergey's big idea, it helps to picture the web like a grand map. Imagine the links that connect to specific pages are like roads. Now, imagine that some of those pages look like cities. They've got many more links leading towards them than the other pages. So those pages, the ones with all the roads heading to them, when those pages link to your page, some of their importance rubs off on you, and you get to be important, too. You get to win at search.
14:59 Speaker 05 This sounds totally intuitive, but it was actually a full paradigm shift for how information had been sorted online. For people searching the web, this made a huge difference, and it changed the power dynamics of the internet. Because it didn't matter who you were. You could be the New York Times or an independent blogger. When important pages link to your website, you could be someone's number-one search result.
15:23 Speaker 05 Larry Sergey translated their idea into an algorithm called PageRank, a play on Larry's last name, Page.
15:29 Speaker 02 Now, they would need a way to put that algorithm into practice, give you a way to use it, and that's Google.
15:34 Speaker 05 And Google worked really well, maybe too well for a dissertation. After all this effort, Larry Sergey faced a crossroads. They had to decide how to share this new ranking system they'd invented.
15:46 Speaker 06 I think they were hesitant because they felt that it was, quote, "the secret sauce," right? It was the thing that was going to make their dissertation better than everybody else's. And if that's the case, you don't put it out there for everybody else to use. On the other hand, they were, they had an academic attitude, and they felt if they did something that was intellectually really interesting, it should be published in the literature.
16:09 Speaker 02 When I hear this, I have this vision of two angels on Larry Sergey's shoulders. One told them, "Publish PageRank as an academic paper." And the other whispered, "Whisk this idea away from Stanford and build this thing into a mega-company."
16:23 Speaker 05 Because this was the mid-1990s. Internet startups were the hottest companies on the planet.
16:28 Speaker 02 But Larry Sergey weren't in it for the internet riches, or so they say.
16:32 Speaker 07 I will say that when we started Google, we did it out of desperation.
16:36 Speaker 02 That's Larry Page. He didn't speak to us for this podcast, neither did Sergey. They infamously avoid the press these days. But here he is in 2002, doing an interview at Stanford, an interview in which he reveals that he and Sergey tried to find a way to satisfy both those academic and entrepreneurial instincts.
16:54 Speaker 07 We actually tried to license Google to other search companies. We talked to them, we wanted to finish our PhDs. None of them were interested.
17:02 Speaker 05 Larry Sergey went to Excite, Infoseek, two other search engines of the time. They wanted to license their idea, but no one was really compelled by Google. According to Sergey, they didn't mind search being a bit clunky.
17:14 Speaker 08 And we really didn't believe that was true. We think, you know, search is really important to people. That's how you get information, which is really critical to you.
17:22 Speaker 08 And so we set about creating our own.
17:24 Speaker 02 Sergey delivered this line on the Charlie Rose Show in 2001. What he's saying is that starting Google, the company, wasn't his first choice. It was something he had to do. The part of this story that really strikes me, though, is Larry and Sergey's sense of sacrifice. The way Larry tells it, it feels like leaving their PhDs behind was like leaving home.
17:45 Speaker 02 You can hear it in his voice. He actually lost something when he started at Google.
17:49 Speaker 05 But the two founders would be martyrs for the cause of accessible information. There is some serious hubris in this story.
17:56 Speaker 02 Right. It sounds like Larry Sergey really believed the world should not, could not, go on without Google. The world's information needed some organizing, and they, Larry and Sergey, were the ones to do it.
18:10 Speaker 02 But if Larry Sergey had to leave Stanford, maybe they could still take some of it with them.
18:15 Speaker 05 Oh, yes, they could. Larry and Sergey's first hire for Google was another student from their PhD program named Craig Silverstein. And they were not done recruiting. Sergey also wanted to hire Heather Carnes, a graduate administrator from their department.
18:29 Speaker 09 And I said, no, thanks. I've got a career. You kids are cute. I'm flattered, but, you know, I didn't want to ruin my future by going to a startup company that would be pretty much gone in two years.
18:47 Speaker 05 Carnes had seen a side of Sergey maybe others in their nerd department didn't know. Carnes was an artist, and Sergey did some art himself. So she remembers he dropped by her office to show her his paintings, which she wasn't too impressed by, but he was still impressed with her. So when it came to that job offer, he wouldn't take no for an answer.
19:06 Speaker 09 They asked me to come down to dinner at the Mandarin Gourmet in Palo Alto, and they kind of talked me into it.
19:15 Speaker 05 And that is how, a year later, Heather Carnes found herself, telling Marissa Meyer to come back the next day to finish up her interview at the ping pong table. Carnes quickly became a key figure in shaping early company culture.
19:27 Speaker 09 My job description was, and I quote, "You're going to do the stuff that we don't want to do." It was the glamour of that job description that really drew me in.
19:39 Speaker 05 Karns had a unique role. She wasn't an engineer. The engineers, they came in late and worked into the night. Karns was used to a nine to five.
19:47 Speaker 09 So I would have to kind of figure out, huh, I'm sitting alone, especially early on. What is my job exactly? So what I did, really for the first two weeks, I wrote the employee handbook. I wrote the manual where most of my policies are pretty much still in place today.
20:07 Speaker 05 And surprise, surprise.
20:08 Speaker 09 I plagiarized the Stanford University Student Handbook because I know that's where they were from and that's where a lot of our new employees were going to come from. So I basically planned to let them come out of the womb to a very warm, safe, fuzzy place.
20:29 Speaker 05 To Karns, Larry Sergey were kids. When she talked to our lead producer, Megan Cunane, she joked she was the designated aunt in the office.
20:36 Speaker 02 Did you trust them as founders?
20:40 Speaker 09 No. Because, you know, here's these... By the way, I was probably almost 10 years and still am almost 10 years older than they were. I felt that they, they had a beautiful life, you know? They had parents that cared, that nurtured them, that understood that they were prodigies. I didn't get the feeling that they had much work experience. For example, I waited on tables to get through college. I had to pay my own way for everything.
21:14 Speaker 02 But in a way, Larry Sergey's lack of work experience fundamentally shaped Google's culture. They built a workplace unlike any other. They built an office that ran much more like a university than a typical corporation.
21:27 Speaker 09 I would like to impress upon everybody that they were first and foremost inventors.
21:34 Speaker 02 Early Google was basically a Willy Wonka factory for nerds.
21:42 Speaker 02 It was not unusual, for example, for Karns to spot Larry and Sergey playing with Legos. She remembers a specific time when she walked in on Larry, Sergey, and Craig Silverstein working with a rubber wheel on paper.
21:58 Speaker 09 And I was asking them, "What are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be building a search engine?" And they said, "Well, we're trying to figure out a way to turn pages without a human being." And I said, "Why? What does that have to do with anything?" And they said, "Well, we hope we can digitize all the world's information and make it available to everybody, but the slowdown is needing a human to turn pages in order to scan that."
22:30 Speaker 02 Larry, Sergey were all about eliminating slowdowns, and not just for themselves.
22:35 Speaker 09 There was very little red tape. People were encouraged to invent things. And it was a big recruiting draw, because rarely were you able to create something in work and have it be seen by the rest of the world like the next day. And that was an important aspect of Google, that you could, especially as a computer scientist, invent something that was alive and usable.
23:05 Speaker 02 And just like Willy Wonka's factory, Google was a technicolor candy land, while all the other more traditional companies were gray. That difference felt really important to the industry, because Google was a place where people believed, above all else, in invention and creativity, in imagination. And if you were a young engineer bursting with big ideas, Google felt like one of the only places in tech that would really honor that ambition.
23:47 Speaker 05 Google was also a candy land in some superficial ways. Like, this is how Karnt remembers an early Google recruiting event.
23:53 Speaker 09 So they had this genius idea to basically have parties at night on the weekend where they'd hand out T-shirts. I mean, we would set up thematic parties with tiki bars and totem poles. But in order to enter, you had to bring your resume. And in order to qualify, you had to be working on a degree in computer science or engineering.
24:21 Speaker 05 This sounds like a college party more than a professional event.
24:24 Speaker 02 And maybe not a party that everyone would want to go to, to find a job. But by 1999, Larry Sergey had put together a team too big for their house/office. So they headed to a real workplace in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley.
24:37 Speaker 05 And they were about to face another crossroads. One that would put pressure on Google's open, creative, inventive workplace.
24:44 Speaker 02 Because of course, Google wasn't part of a fictional world where innovation is powered by Willy Wonka's pure imagination.
24:51 Speaker 05 Google was a company in the real world, and it would need to start making some serious money. After the break, Larry Sergey set their own rules of business and laid the foundation for Google, the empire.
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26:23 Speaker 02 Marissa Meyer was Google employee number 20. When she started, the company made money by licensing its search technology. Basically, Google would tell major companies that had lots of disorganized information on their websites, "Hey, pay us a fee and we'll make your websites more searchable because we're the best at search." And one day, Meyer remembers, the Washington Post agreed to talk.
26:44 Speaker 03 And Joan Braddy, our early sales director, was taking the meeting.
26:49 Speaker 02 Pretty soon, the whole company heard about this meeting. It was exciting. This was a chance for Google to land a deal with a major media company. But one Googler was concerned.
26:58 Speaker 03 An engineer named Amit Patel got very upset about this meeting with Joan. He became really upset and concerned because he was worried that Joan might tell the Washington Post that, you know, we'll put an article that they think is more important first in the search results or, you know, not be as comprehensive if they didn't want us to be. Things that he really viewed would compromise our integrity.
27:23 Speaker 02 The way Meyer tells it, essentially, Patel was worried that Google would sell out.
27:29 Speaker 02 Google's search was so good, so different from everything else when it came out, because when you searched on Google, the most relevant information came first. That wasn't the case for other search engines. Some of Google's competitors let advertisers pay their way to the top of results, and it was hard to tell what was an ad. Meyer says Patel didn't want The Washington Post to think that if they were writing checks to Google, Google would rank their articles any better.
27:54 Speaker 03 And so the day before, I remember he walked around the office and he asked all these people, like, what do you think she's going to promise? What do you think they're going to ask for?
28:00 Speaker 02 But by close of business day before the meeting, Patel seemed to have calmed down, and Meyer assumed he'd just worked things out with Joan.
28:08 Speaker 03 And it turned out instead what he had done, he had this very neat handwriting, which I affectionately used to call Patel San-Seraf, because his last name was Patel. And so Joan started the meeting the next day, and when she looked at the whiteboard, it was a blank whiteboard, because it had been erased before the meeting. But in the lower left-hand corner, in Amit's incredibly neat handwriting, it said, tiny little letters, "Don't be evil."
28:33 Speaker 02 "Don't be evil." If you know anything about Google's culture, you know those three words: "Don't be evil." "Don't be evil" became arguably the most important principle at the company. It's catchy, it's quotable, it's mockable, especially today, when Google's critics accuse the company of ethical breaches and monopolistic business practices.
28:55 Speaker 02 But to people working at Google, it wasn't just empty corporate speak. Engineers liked "Don't be evil." It was a simple directive to guide them along their way on their ambitious mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible.
29:08 Speaker 05 Googlers liked it so much that it became an official Google value. Sometime after Patel's whiteboard reminder, HR put on a formal exercise to come up with official core values for the company. And another influential engineer named Paul Buchheit, who also came up with Gmail, by the way, suggested that they just use "don't be evil."
29:27 Speaker 03 Paul was the one who re-brought it up again then and said, you know, "Look, can we just dispense with this exercise? We have our core value. It's don't be evil. Like, let's just have that be the core value, and you can let us all go back to, you know, our engineering."
29:40 Speaker 02 We asked other people about this story. Joan Bradye through Google says she doesn't recall the Washington Post meeting. Paul Buchheit actually remembers that he was the first to come up with "don't be evil" during the HR exercise, and it was after that that Patel started scribbling the phrase all over the place. But Buchheit did say that he shared an office with Meyer and Patel at the time, so it's possible Patel, quote, "implanted," unquote, the mantra in Buchheit's mind, inception style. Basically, this was over 20 years ago, so it makes sense the grand "don't be evil" origin story has a couple different variations, depending who you talk to. What matters is that the idea stuck.
30:14 Speaker 05 Not everyone took the new mantra as a sacred scripture, though, like Heather Carnes from HR.
30:19 Speaker 09 I thought it was naive and maybe a little silly.
30:24 Speaker 09 And I don't really understand. I guess I did understand what they meant by evil, but that's just a word I would never put in a mission statement for any reason.
30:35 Speaker 09 I don't know. Like, "don't be satanic"? I don't know.
30:41 Speaker 09 I'm thinking more, hey, when you're 200 people, is this still your mission statement? If we continue to grow and succeed, is all of this going to be child's play, I guess?
30:55 Speaker 02 It wasn't a normal value, but Google wasn't a normal company. Remember, it had that mix of naivete and hubris. The moment Patel scribbled "don't be evil" onto that whiteboard, he was actually declaring himself and the other rank-and-file engineers the stewards of Google's ethics. And not just stewards of deciding what's evil for the company, but for Google's users, too.
31:18 Speaker 05 But the thing is, not being evil isn't so simple, because tensions inevitably arise as you grow. The bigger you get, decisions that used to be simple become complicated. And Google wanted to be big. So Google needed a bigger business model than licensing search.
31:37 Speaker 03 We thought about should people pay directly for search? Should you pay like a $20 per year subscription for search?
31:44 Speaker 05 Let's pause for a second to consider what might have been, because it wasn't inevitable that Google would be free. The search engine could have always been a luxury internet good for the wealthy. Right? You're rich, you search. Or an academic tool. But that would cut off a lot of the world. And that's not the world that Larry and Sergey wanted.
32:01 Speaker 03 And as we thought about it, we realized that we could actually optimize both for revenue and for user happiness by allowing ads.
32:14 Speaker 05 An attempt to optimize for revenue and happiness? Hmm. The way Google decided to make money in those early days is fascinating. I mean that. To get the backstory, you have to meet Jen Fitzpatrick. She's an early Google engineer who had a hand in many of the most successful products in all of Google's history. One of those products was AdWords, Google's first ad product. Marissa Meyer hired Fitzpatrick in 1999, right out of, you guessed it, Stanford University. Fitzpatrick is now one of the highest ranking executives at the company. Her official title is Senior Vice President of Google's Core Systems and Experiences.
32:50 Speaker 11 Which is really the infrastructure that powers some of our biggest services from search to ads to YouTube to Gmail to Maps and more.
32:59 Speaker 05 Just describing her role took Fitzpatrick 30 seconds.
33:02 Speaker 11 User experiences, privacy, security, a lot of the things that kind of underpin and are shared and used by all of Google's different products and services.
33:11 Speaker 05 But back to the 90s, when not much of that stuff existed.
33:13 Speaker 11 AdWords was really the moment where ads at Google took off in a big way.
33:22 Speaker 05 AdWords is a simple but brilliant way to make money from search. Let me talk you through it. When you're searching for something to buy, you often type in exactly what you want, right? That's called declaring your purchase intent in advertising speak. So let's say you live in Wisconsin and you're in the market for a new car. You'd Google something like "car dealerships in Madison." Google would then show you results for car dealerships. And AdWords gives advertisers a chance to get on that page and say, "Hey, how about me?" So if you're a Hyundai dealership in Madison, those searches for "car dealerships near you" are gold. Giving advertisers this path to customers could be gold for Google too, just as long as they didn't ruin the search experience.
34:05 Speaker 05 Google put a lot of thought into how the ads would show up on the page.
34:09 Speaker 11 How we would distinguish ads from search results and trying to be really transparent about what was paid and what was organic.
34:18 Speaker 05 Because Google didn't want users to confuse ads with search results. So they made ads look distinct, putting them off to the side or highlighting them in yellow. Regular search still operated how it always had, but ads gave businesses this elegant way to get to the specific eyeballs they wanted, based on what people were searching for.
34:37 Speaker 11 That was always a big part of the idea and the intent is that, done right, ads should be helpful and relevant and a way to help in those types of commercial queries to be able to deliver helpful information to users, but also make money while doing so.
35:00 Speaker 05 But here's the tension. Google definitely wants you, the user, to have a great experience. But let's be real, you're not the one paying the bills. That car dealership is.
35:09 Speaker 02 Which means, Google has split loyalties. It wants both search users and advertisers to be happy, but there's no way around it. The Google user and the advertiser will have different agendas.
35:20 Speaker 05 You want what's most useful? Advertisers want you to buy something. This tension isn't inherently evil. Advertising can be useful, like Fitzpatrick says, but it would make "Don't Be Evil" a tough standard to live up to.
35:32 Speaker 02 Google continued to grow its advertising business. And how some of those advertising products track people across the web, collecting user data along the way, worries digital privacy advocates and lawmakers.
35:44 Speaker 05 The point is, over the years, Google would twist itself into a pretzel, trying to satisfy both its users and its own need for revenue, and sometimes, market dominance.
35:54 Speaker 02 But Googlers still worked with "Don't Be Evil" as a guide, including Marissa Meyer. Now, when people talk about "Don't Be Evil," sometimes they question, "Oh, is it just a mantra?" I just wonder if it personally impacted any of the business decisions you made, or if it was ever something that came up in conversations when you were leading so many of these influential products.
36:15 Speaker 03 Absolutely. I mean, never because we were contemplating doing something bad, but if we ever just felt like, wait, there's two different paths we could go down here, we would debate, which ones do we think would do more good for the users?
36:31 Speaker 02 In 2018, Google quietly moved the phrase "don't be evil" from the top down to the very bottom of its code of conduct. But we're still trusting Google to do right by us. Each time, we check our email, take notes, look up COVID-19 statistics, or plug directions into Google Maps while we're driving. So I'm putting in 1600, is it Amphitheater? Yeah.
36:54 Speaker 12 In a quarter mile, turn right onto Amphitheater Parkway.
36:57 Speaker 02 Google's talking to me. All right, now, now they're done. But yeah, I'm going to 1600 Amphitheater Parkway in Mountain View, California. And that is the Googleplex. In December 2020, Alex and I met up at the Googleplex, the company's headquarters. Okay, here I am. You can tell because you see all this like red, yellow, and blue, primary color googly stuff.
37:20 Speaker 05 You have a right. Usually over 25,000 people work at the Googleplex. But when we visited, it was empty.
37:28 Speaker 02 Okay, so there's a sign on this Google green lawn chair, and it says, "This space is closed." As a precaution against COVID-19, this applies to the massage rooms, game rooms, gyms, pools, shower rooms, laundry, maker spaces, music rooms, meeting pods, and miscellaneous seating. Wow, that is quite a list. I mean, that's it. That's all the Google perks right there on one sign.
37:56 Speaker 05 I was about to say, I just learned about Google perks just by learning about the perks they've shut down.
38:02 Speaker 02 Even in the absence of actual Google employees, you can still feel the whimsy of Google's early culture. Everything is painted the same colors as Google's logo: the food trucks, bicycles, lawn chairs. Even the potted plants are googly red, blue, yellow, and green. And there's like a green Android statue, little Android robot that waves at you. And what else?
38:25 Speaker 05 Beach, volleyball, courts.
38:28 Speaker 02 Looking around at all this whimsy, I still couldn't help but think of the last time I was at this campus, when its courtyards were filled with thousands of angry Google employees who felt like their company in that moment was not a good place to be.
38:48 Speaker 02 Google had a major reckoning with its internal culture in November of 2018, lit by the match of a sexual harassment scandal. The New York Times reported that Google protected executives who were accused of sexual harassment for years, including Android co-founder Andy Rubin. Rubin walked away with a $90 million exit package, even after the company found credible claims of sexual misconduct against him. Rubin denies these claims, but Googlers were livid.
39:15 Speaker 13 We do hold ourselves to such high moral standards, especially our mantra of "don't be evil." I mean, this, to me, is the epitome of evil.
39:26 Speaker 02 Days after The Times revealed the damning allegations about Rubin, over 20,000 Google employees walked off the job in protest, demanding the company take accountability on sexual harassment in the workplace. It was a historic showing of dissent in tech, and it was unthinkable that this could happen at Google, which was supposed to be the happiest of all the tech companies. But the Google walkout was about more than just one executive getting away with bad behavior. The protest opened a Pandora's Box of long-brewing issues inside Google: how it pays its cafeteria workers and other contractors, whether it's doing enough to hire women and people of color, if it should be selling its products to law enforcement. Beneath the Willy Wonka veneer, these tensions always existed at Google.
40:11 Speaker 02 The walkout just shattered Google's once-pristine image of being a techie wonderland, and if sexual harassment was in its upper ranks, there was a fear that that rot could trickle down through its culture to the end user, too.
40:23 Speaker 14 We have an aspiration. That aspiration is to be the best company in the world that provides products and services that people all over the world can depend on. And if we don't have it cleaned up at home, we're not delivering on what we said we were going to deliver.
40:43 Speaker 05 In other words, if Google's own employees couldn't trust the company not to be evil, how could users? It's not just Google's employees who are uneasy about the future of the company. It's people on both sides of the aisle and some of the most powerful seats of our government. From the ultra-right-wing congressman Jim Jordan
41:00 Speaker 15 I'll just cut to the chase. Big tech's out to get conservatives.
41:04 Speaker 05 To progressive senator Elizabeth Warren.
41:06 Speaker 16 In 2012, FTC staff concluded that Google was using its dominant search engine to harm its rivals.
41:14 Speaker 02 There is a lot to tell in the story of Google. There are its great inventions, its endless ambition, its work culture that's getting scrutinized like never before. This season, we are going to ask why Google employees are fighting over the ethos of the company, what its next big invention is going to be, if it ever finds one as big as search, and how it's grappling with organizing the world's information when the very nature of what is fact and what is false is up for debate.
41:41 Speaker 05 We're going to bring you through the evolution of a small garage startup to a company so big, the US government is accusing it of being a monopoly. We're interrogating what it took to get that big, at what cost?
41:52 Speaker 02 And what it means for the rest of us to live in the land of this giant.
42:06 Speaker 02 Next week, two tech giants declare war. It's Google versus Apple. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, Google was actually working on its own mobile project, Android. Now, most of the world's phones run on Android, and we will tell the story of how Google achieved that dominance. It's a story of betrayal among the top founders in Silicon Valley.
42:29 Speaker 15 Jobs went crazy. He just went crazy. He felt like he'd been stabbed in the back.
42:34 Speaker 02 And, more importantly, it's a story of how Google decided it needed to become a giant to survive it all.
42:46 Speaker 02 Land of the Giants: The Google Empire is a production of Recode by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
42:52 Speaker 05 Megan Cunane is the show's lead producer. Lissa Soep is our editor.
42:57 Speaker 02 Nathan Miller is our associate producer and engineer at this episode. Emily Sen is our fact checker. Our theme song was composed by Galtham Shrikashun. Sam Altman is Recode's editor in chief. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer.
43:11 Speaker 05 I'm Alex Cantrell. You can check out my weekly interview series, Big Technology Podcast, on your favorite podcast app.
43:18 Speaker 02 And I'm Shereen Ghaffari. If you liked this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and tell a friend. And subscribe to hear our next episode when it drops. Quick disclosure: Vox.com and Vox Media create content for and do business with Google. None of the people creatively involved with this season of Land of the Giants are involved with those projects.
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44:13 Speaker 18 Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com slash Vox. That's O-D-U-O dot com slash Vox.
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