In The Plex

From starting at the bottom of borrowing Stanford’s computers to buying thousands of old servers to run their engine on, the two college students weren’t afraid to take unconventional steps. Exceptional founders value their ideas more than anyone else could. It keeps them from giving up because they can’t let their little children die until they are able to fly on their own. Most remarkably, they valued simplicity, speed and truth above all else. I found this book to be a great story of how important decision-making becomes as you enter those murky waters where transparency clashes with scale.

Highlights

But for the next year and a half, all the companies they approached turned them down. “We couldn’t get anyone interested,” says Page. “We did get offers, but they weren’t for much money. So we said, ‘Whatever,’ and went back to Stanford to work on it some more. It wasn’t like we wanted a lot of money, but we wanted the stuff to get really used. And they would want us to work there and we’d ask, ‘Do we really want to work for this company?’ These companies weren’t going to focus on search—they were becoming portals. They didn’t understand search, and they weren’t technology people.”

Another form of corporate load balancing assures that engineers’ dreams won’t mess with the bottom line. Around 2005, Google determined a simple formula to distribute its engineering talent: 70–20–10. Seventy percent of its engineers would work in either search or ads. Twenty percent would focus on key products such as applications. The remaining 10 percent would work on wild cards, which often emerged from the 20 percent time when people could choose their own projects.

Katie Stanton parsed her job the same way Google divided its overall corporate energies, breaking it up 70, 20, 10. The bulk of her work, 70 percent, was amplifying the president’s message. The 20 percent part was gathering input from various online constituencies (the “mommy bloggers,” the financial consumers, and so on) and interacting with them. Finally, the smallest part was helping citizens interact with one another. Stanton thought that was the most important part of her work, but its lower priority made it the hardest to get done.

For a number of years, Brin and Page drew organizational and clerical support from a pool of four sharp young women known as LSA, or Larry and Sergey Assistants. (Googlers referred to LSA as if it were a single organization. You would say, “I’ll check with LSA to see if Sergey can come to this meeting.”) The system seemed to work well, but Brin and Page felt constrained. By having assistants, they noticed, it was easier for people to ask things of them. “Most people aren’t willing to ask me if they want to meet with me,” says Page. “They’re happy to ask an assistant.” When a meeting request came, an LSA would have to see if Page or Brin actually wanted to do it. In truth, the founders almost never wanted to do it. So one day, Brin and Page abruptly dissolved LSA. They would thereafter have no assistants. Whatever they felt was important at the moment would be their work. Sergey sometimes liked to move his workplace right in the middle of a project he found interesting. And sometimes he or Larry would just take off somewhere. Even the communications people would have no idea where they were.

That’s the way Google works,” Rubin later explained. “Don’t ask for permission for an idea, just go and do it. And then, when you’re way beyond the point of no return, you’re like, ‘I need $ 200 million.’

Google’s People Operations team had constructed a system with nine levels of employee status below the top executives (who were tens and elevens on that scale). Some of the distinctions were vague. Often, Google didn’t even share with employees what level they occupied on the ladder, an odd departure from its usual internal transparency. Bock would explain that the stealth was due to “cognitive heuristics.” These were the deep-seated mental processes that made people think that they should defer to someone with a higher title. “That might help you on the savannah and it might help you in big companies, but it doesn’t help us at Google,” says Bock. “Eric and Larry want anybody to be able to tell someone, ‘You’re wrong,’ and give ten reasons why.”

“According to Chan, at one meeting a number of people Lee hired in China began squabbling about what their titles should be. “Your title,” Chan told them, “is product manager.” They objected that in China no one knew what that meant, and they preferred the official appellation of “special assistant to Kai-Fu Lee,” so everyone would know that they had the ear of the esteemed leader of Google China. Chan almost fell over. “This isn’t the White House!” he told them. “Our job is to be focused on users, not Kai-Fu.” But they insisted and told him that it was important for them to sit within a hundred feet of Lee, a geographic honor that would cement their status as special assistants.”

Takeaways