New career search provides Google outsider’s lucky break

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

However, to an outsider, it looked anarchic. And Douglas Edwards, who packed in a promising career mid-trajectory to try his hand at this startup thing, was a Google outsider.

An English major who arrived at marketing by default, Edwards quit a newspaper job to go and work for a search engine with no chance run by a “bunch of college kids”. He became Google’s first director of consumer marketing and brand management.

Edwards reveals that often the nascent Google didn’t really know what it was doing; it knew what it wanted, but not always how to get there. And, as it became beloved of geeks as a search engine that actually worked — a rare thing at the time — many of the mis-steps, stumbles and awkward moments were due to inexperience and not thinking things through. But, in spite of all that, the Google guys managed to build a better mousetrap, and to monetise it through a response-based advertising system that is a money-making behemoth to this day.

As with all of these swashbuckling business tales, there are the close calls; capacity crunches that brought the site down, tense contract negotiations that could have gone either way but for a stretch of the truth and a frantic weekend’s coding.

Edwards makes much of his inexperience with dot-com startups and his firm roots in old media; however, he appears to have been a defter hand than his modesty would let him claim.

He continually curbed his founders’ excesses, guided them into more sensible positions with regard to communications, and — however arbitrary their approach to an issue, including their parsimonious approach to business expenses, like getting the bus while travelling on business — he appears to have achieved all that he could have been asked to, strapped to a rocket whose trajectory was almost straight up.

There’s also a specific anecdote of interest to Irish readers; at a time of stratospheric growth, Google began to negotiate hard for data centre capacity in Ireland. At the time, the three providers gave their price and Google — unfairly, but cannily — revealed their prices to each other. After a second round of price negotiations, the deal was sealed at a rock bottom discount — with all three of them, such was the search giant’s need to corral its kit.

Google was not and probably never will be a conventional organisation; but it is now in its teens and prospering in a way that could never have been anticipated. Whether the core value of the organisation that was so hotly debated — Don’t be evil — will survive is moot now; it grew by being user-centric (that is, not evil to its users) and now it’s top of the heap, why would it change? It’s still feeling lucky; and they, to a large extent make their own luck.