--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform. Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form. All it takes is a bit of intention, style, and, of course, the perfect cold weather staples. So find the perfect look for you with the help of Macy's Fall Fashion Guide, your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts. From leather to denim to cozy knits, find everything you need to piece together your new fall look. Explore the Macy's Fall Guide for yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram. And we've talked a bunch on the show about European efforts to regulate big tech, more recently American efforts to regulate big tech. But last week, we got an Australian effort to regulate big tech that could end up being hugely influential.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Australian government told Google and Facebook that if they want to feature stories from news outlets on their platforms, they'd have to cough up some cash to the publishers whose work they're featuring. It's kind of like a David versus Goliath story where Google is obviously Goliath.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And David is actually Rupert Murdoch, who controls like over half of the newspaper business in Australia. And in this case, David kind of won after fighting this legislation tooth and nail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Facebook told the Australian government it would not comply and basically wiped a bunch of Australian news outlets from its site immediately. Scary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Google signaled it would comply. It worked out a deal to start paying for the news featured on its platforms. Maybe because Microsoft voiced some support for the legislation. Shout outs to Bing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe it's because Google sees the writing on the wall. Change is in the air, tech is going to get regulated, and they can't fight it forever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Since this very well may be the season of change for big tech, it's worth knowing where and how all these companies got started. Facebook got a movie, but what about Google? The Vox Media Podcast Network has a show to fill the void, the Google movie void. It's called Land of the Giants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We brought you an episode from their prior season about Netflix last year. And just last week, they launched their latest season all about Google. Today, we're bringing you episode one on the Google empire. It's the story of how two grad school students turned a search engine idea into maybe the most powerful company in the history of the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you want to hear more, you know the drill. Find and subscribe to Land of the Giants wherever you find and subscribe to your podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Here's your host, Shereen Ghaffari.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: In 1999, Marissa Meyer was sitting in the most important interview of her life. It was at a startup called Google. That meeting was at their conference table in the main conference room at 165 University, which also happened to be a ping pong table.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, was not going easy on her. Sergey did all the talking and quizzed me intensely on a lot of different computer science topics, had me draw out the graphing of K-means clustering and centroids and how to find the differences in the centers and things like that.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Larry seemed quiet and, truthfully, honestly somewhat distracted. Larry Page, the other founder of Google.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: The pair wrapped the interview up early. They had something else on their minds. And they left the door open so I could kind of hear what was going on outside.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And then I heard, you know, them call and say, OK, like, who's going with us for the Kleiner pitch? Kleiner is in Kleiner Perkins, the legendary venture capital firm.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So I think you're going to have to come back tomorrow.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Doerr led Kleiner's early investments in Netscape and Amazon, and now Google needed his golden touch.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: They had a 24-page pitch deck, which I still have a copy of. 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I want to tell you, that's not a business model. For an investor like Doerr, that didn't matter. He thought Larry and Sergey were wicked smart and almost unrealistically ambitious.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Because Google's founders wanted to organize all the world's information. They looked at the world and understood how it is and imagined a different and better world.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And that they could get there with technology. 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But Doerr actually believed Larry and Sergey when they said it. 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I'm Shereen Ghaffari. And I'm talking to Terry Winograd.
--:-- Terry Winograd: I'm Terry Winograd. I'm a professor of computer science at Stanford University.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I mean, I think there was one article that referred to you as like the Yoda of Silicon Valley. And so I think that was based on looks.
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: What is your secret?
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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.
--:-- Terry Winograd: That location? Stanford University.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Winograd started teaching computer science there in 1973, back when Silicon Valley was practically an apple orchard.
--:-- Terry Winograd: He retired in 2012, but early in his tenure, he met one of his most famous mentees.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I actually met Larry when he was seven years old.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Winograd remembers meeting Larry as a kid when his father, who was a professor, visited Stanford.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Both of Larry's parents were accomplished computer science researchers, so it was only natural that he would follow the same path.
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I remember him coming in and talking about space tethers which computer science it wasn't even practical and certainly still isn't basically.
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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 try it
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Soon enough, Larry became friends with a fellow classmate who was game to humor his wild ideas, Sergey Brin.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Sergey was also the child of accomplished academics. His parents emigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union when he was six.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And like Larry, Sergey grew up going to Montessori schools. And he was a little wacky.
--:-- Terry Winograd: I mostly thought of him as, you know, the guy who works with Larry. He was kind of a character, it seems like.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: In spite of the signs up saying no rollerblades allowed in the hallways.
--:-- Terry Winograd: What were they like back then? I mean, they were these bright. Very bright and sort of cocky.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: You know, they're very self-assured. When I talked to people who knew Larry and Sergey in their early days, their names mold into one. Larry and Sergey, or sometimes just Larry Sergey.
--:-- Terry Winograd: It slips off the tongue. It shows just how connected they were once they started putting their minds together, even though they were also pretty different.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Sergey was a more sociable one. He was naturally outgoing and quick to share his strong opinions on whatever subject he was talking about.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Larry was more reserved, but equally confident.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: They were decently likable. I mean, especially because we're in a nerd department.
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Like navigating the World Wide Web. This was back when the general population was just getting access to the Internet.
--:-- Terry Winograd: The volume of content online was exploding. Really, the web was as much of an unknown as space.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And trying to find your way around that web in the mid-1990s was not pretty.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Your best bet was to use the Yahoo directory, which was literally a human-made list of websites, just like a Cyber Yellow Pages.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And if you did try a search engine, well, good luck. 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.
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: To do that, you'd just have to download and index everything on the internet. Every single web page. No big deal.
--:-- Terry Winograd: This was just the kind of challenge Sergei couldn't resist.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Winograd says the pair came to him to pitch their plan. Basically, I said, no, you can't do all that. And they said, oh, yes, we can.
--:-- Terry Winograd: And I said, well, go ahead and try.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So Larry and Sergey started tapping into Stanford servers. And their Map the Web exercise ended up taking down the entire campus network.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Freaking geniuses on rollerblades.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Yeah, but the project was a success. Through that web crawl, Larry and Sergey discovered something. A new, elegant way to sort information online.
--:-- Terry Winograd: To get to the genius of Larry and Sergey's big idea, it helps to picture the web like a grand map.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Imagine the links that connect to specific pages are like roads.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Now, imagine that some of those pages look like cities. They've got many more links leading towards them than the other pages.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Terry Winograd: And you get to be important too. You get to win at search.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: This sounds totally intuitive, but it was actually a full paradigm shift for how information had been sorted online.
--:-- Terry Winograd: For people searching the web, this made a huge difference.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And it changed the power dynamics of the internet.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Because it didn't matter who you were. You could be the New York Times or an independent blogger.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: When important pages link to your website, you could be someone's number one search result.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Larry Sergei translated their idea into an algorithm called PageRank, a play on Larry's last name, Page.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Now they would need a way to put that algorithm into practice, give you a way to use it. And that's Google.
--:-- Terry Winograd: And Google worked really well, maybe too well for a dissertation.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: After all this effort, Larry Sergei faced a crossroads. They had to decide how to share this new ranking system they'd invented.
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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 search engine better than everybody else's.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And if that's the case, you don't put it out there for everybody else to use.
--:-- Terry Winograd: On the other hand, they had an academic attitude and they felt if they did something that was intellectually really interesting, it should be published in the literature.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: When I hear this, I have this vision of two angels on Larry Sergei's shoulders.
--:-- Terry Winograd: One told them, publish PageRank as an academic paper.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And the other whispered, whisk this idea away from Stanford and build this thing into a mega company.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Because this was the mid-1990s. Internet startups were the hottest companies on the planet.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But Larry Sergei weren't in it for the internet riches. Or so they say.
--:-- Terry Winograd: I will say that when we started Google, we did it out of desperation.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: That's Larry Page. He didn't speak to us for this podcast. Neither did Sergey.
--:-- Terry Winograd: They infamously avoid the press these days.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But here he is in 2002, doing an interview at Stanford.
--:-- Terry Winograd: An interview in which he reveals that he and Sergey tried to find a way to satisfy both those academic and entrepreneurial instincts.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: We actually tried to license Google to other search companies. We talked to them. We wanted to finish our PhDs.
--:-- Terry Winograd: None of them were interested.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Larry Sergei went to Excite, Infoseek, two other search engines of the time.
--:-- Terry Winograd: They wanted to license their idea, but no one was really compelled by Google.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: According to Sergey, they didn't mind search being a bit clunky.
--:-- Terry Winograd: And we really didn't believe that was true.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: We think, you know, search is really important to people. It's how you get information, which is really critical to you.
--:-- Terry Winograd: And so we set about creating our own.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Sergei delivered this line on the Charlie Rose Show in 2001.
--:-- Terry Winograd: What he's saying is that starting Google, the company, wasn't his first choice. It was something he had to do.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: The part of this story that really strikes me, though, is Larry and Sergey's sense of sacrifice.
--:-- Terry Winograd: The way Larry tells it, it feels like leaving their PhDs behind was like leaving home.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: You can hear it in his voice. He actually lost something when he started Google.
--:-- Terry Winograd: But the two founders would be martyrs for the cause of accessible information.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: There is some serious hubris in this story. Right.
--:-- Terry Winograd: It sounds like Larry Sergei really believed the world should not, could not go on without Google.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: The world's information needed some organizing. And they, Larry and Sergei, were the ones to do it.
--:-- Terry Winograd: But if Larry Sergei had to leave Stanford, maybe they could still take some of it with them.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Oh, yes, they could.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Larry and Sergei's first hire for Google was another student from their PhD program named Craig Silverstein.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And they were not done recruiting.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Sergei also wanted to hire Heather Carnes, a graduate administrator from their department.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And I said, no, thanks. I've got a career. You kids are cute.
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Carnes had seen a side of Sergei maybe others in their nerd department didn't know.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Carnes was an artist, and Sergei did some art himself.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Terry Winograd: So when it came to that job offer, he wouldn't take no for an answer.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: They asked me to come down to dinner at the Mandarin Gourmet in Palo Alto, and they kind of talked me into it.
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Carnes quickly became a key figure in shaping early company culture.
--:-- Terry Winograd: My job description was, and I quote, you're going to do the stuff that we don't want to do.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: It was the glamour of that job description that really drew me in.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Carnes had a unique role. She wasn't an engineer. The engineers, they came in late and worked into the night.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Carnes was used to a nine to five. So I would have to kind of figure out, I'm sitting alone, especially early on.
--:-- Terry Winograd: What is my job exactly?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So what I did really for the first two weeks, I wrote the employee handbook.
--:-- Terry Winograd: I wrote the manual where most of my policies are pretty much still in place today.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And surprise, surprise. I plagiarized the Stanford University student handbook because I know that's where they were from.
--:-- Terry Winograd: And that's where a lot of our new employees were going to come from.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So I basically planned to let them come out of the womb to a very warm, safe, fuzzy place.
--:-- Terry Winograd: To Carnes, Larry and Sergey were kids.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: When she talked to our lead producer, Megan Kunane, she joked she was the designated aunt in the office.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Did you trust them as founders?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Terry Winograd: I felt that they had a beautiful life. You know, they had parents that cared, that nurtured them, that understood that they were prodigies.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I didn't get the feeling that they had much work experience.
--:-- Terry Winograd: For example, I waited on tables to get through college, I had to pay my own way for everything.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But in a way, Larry Sergei's lack of work experience fundamentally shaped Google's culture.
--:-- Terry Winograd: They built a workplace unlike any other. They built an office that ran much more like a university than a typical corporation.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I would like to impress upon everybody that they were first and foremost inventors.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Early Google was basically a Willy Wonka factory for nerds. Come with me. And you'll be in a world of pure imagination.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: It was not unusual, for example, for Carnes to spot Larry and Sergey playing with Legos.
--:-- Terry Winograd: She remembers a specific time when she walked in on Larry, Sergey, and Craig Silverstein working with a rubber wheel on paper.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And I was asking them, what are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be building a search engine?
--:-- Terry Winograd: And they said, well, we're trying to figure out a way to turn pages without a human being.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And I said, why? What does that have to do with anything?
--:-- Terry Winograd: And they said, well, we hope we can digitize all the world's information and make it available to everybody.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But the slowdown is needing a human to turn pages in order to scan that.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Larry and Sergey were all about eliminating slowdowns, and not just for themselves.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: There was very little red tape. People were encouraged to invent things.
--:-- Terry Winograd: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And that was an important aspect of Google that you could, especially as a computer scientist, invent something that was alive and usable.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Anything you want to do is want to change the world. There's nothing to it.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And just like Willy Wonka's factory, Google was a Technicolor Candyland, while all the other more traditional companies were gray.
--:-- Terry Winograd: That difference felt really important to the industry, because Google was a place where people believed, above all else, in invention, in creativity, in imagination.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Google was also a candy land in some superficial ways. Like, this is how Carnes remembers an early Google recruiting event.
--:-- Terry Winograd: So they had this genius idea to basically have parties at night, on the weekend, where they'd hand out T-shirts.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I mean, we would set up thematic parties with tiki bars and totem poles.
--:-- Terry Winograd: But in order to enter, you had to bring your resume.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And in order to qualify, you had to be working on a degree in computer science or engineering.
--:-- Terry Winograd: This sounds like a college party more than a professional event.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And maybe not a party that everyone would want to go to to find a job.
--:-- Terry Winograd: But by 1999, Larry Sergei had put together a team too big for their house slash office.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So they headed to a real workplace in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley.
--:-- Terry Winograd: And they were about to face another crossroads, one that would put pressure on Google's open, creative, inventive workplace.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Because of course, Google wasn't part of a fictional world where innovation is powered by Willy Wonka's pure imagination.
--:-- Terry Winograd: Google was a company in the real world, and it would need to start making some serious money.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: After the break, Larry, Sergey set their own rules of business and lay the foundation for Google, the empire.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
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--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But still, we stick it out. And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I've already put years into this place.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And maybe the most common one, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry.me.
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--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So don't leave your career to chance. Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: That's strawberry.me slash unstuck.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Marissa Meyer was Google employee number 20. When she started, the company made money by licensing its search technology.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And one day, Meyer remembers, the Washington Post agreed to talk.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And Joan Braddye, our early sales director, was taking the meeting.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Pretty soon, the whole company heard about this meeting.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: It was exciting. This was a chance for Google to land a deal with a major media company.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But one Googler was concerned.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: An engineer named Amit Patel got very upset about this meeting with Joan.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: He became really upset and concerned because he was worried that Joan might tell the Washington Post that, you know, will 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Things that he really viewed would compromise our integrity.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: The way Meyer tells it, essentially, Patel was worried that Google would sell out.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Google 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: That wasn't the case for other search engines.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Some of Google's competitors let advertisers pay their way to the top of results.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And it was hard to tell what was an ad.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But by close of business day before the meeting, Patel seemed to have calmed down.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And Meyer assumed he'd just work things out with Joan.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And it turned out instead what he had done, he had this very neat handwriting, which I affectionately used to call Patel Sansarif because his last name was Patel.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Don't be evil. Simple directive to guide them along their way on their ambitious mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Googlers liked it so much that it became an official Google value.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Sometime after Patel's whiteboard reminder, HR put on a formal exercise to come up with official core values for the company.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And another influential engineer named Paul Buhite, who also came up with Gmail, by the way, suggested that they just use don't be evil.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Paul was the one who re-brought it up again then and said, you know, look, can we all, can we just dispense with this exercise.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: We have our core value. It's don't be evil. Let's just have that be the core value.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And you can let us all go back to our engineering.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: We asked other people about this story. Joan Braddye through Google says she doesn't recall the Washington Post meeting.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Paul Buchheit actually remembers that he was the first to come up with don't be evil during the HR exercise.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And it was after that that Patel started scribbling the phrase all over the place.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But Buchheit did say that he shared an office with Meyer and Patel at the time.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So it's possible Patel, quote, implanted, unquote, the mantra in Bukhite's mind, Inception style.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: What matters is that the idea stuck.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Not everyone took the new mantra as a sacred scripture, though, like Heather Carnes from HR.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I thought it was naive and maybe a little silly, and I don't really understand.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I don't know. Like, don't be satanic.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: It wasn't a normal value, but Google wasn't a normal company.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Remember, it had that mix of naivete and hubris.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: 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.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And not just stewards of deciding what's evil for the company, but for Google's users, too.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But the thing is, not being evil isn't so simple, because tensions inevitably arise as you grow.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: The bigger you get, decisions that used to be simple become complicated.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And Google wanted to be big.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So Google needed a bigger business model than licensing search.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: We thought about should people pay directly for search? Should you pay like a $20 per year subscription for search?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Let's pause for a second to consider what might have been.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Because it wasn't inevitable that Google would be free.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: The search engine could have always been a luxury internet good for the wealthy, right?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: You're rich, you search, or an academic tool.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But that would cut off a lot of the world.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And that's not the world that Larry and Sergey wanted.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And as we thought about it, we realized that we could actually optimize both for revenue and for user happiness by allowing ads.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: An attempt to optimize for revenue and happiness? Hmm.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: The way Google decided to make money in those early days is fascinating. I mean that.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: To get the backstory, you have to meet Jen Fitzpatrick.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: She's an early Google engineer who had a hand in many of the most successful products in all of Google's history.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: One of those products was AdWords, Google's first ad product.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Marissa Meyer hired Fitzpatrick in 1999, right out of, you guessed it, Stanford University.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Fitzpatrick is now one of the highest ranking executives at the company.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Her official title is Senior Vice President of Google Core Systems and Experiences.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Which is really the infrastructure that powers some of our biggest services from search to ads to YouTube to Gmail to Maps and more.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Just describing her role took Fitzpatrick 30 seconds, literally.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Privacy, security, a lot of the things that kind of underpin and are shared in use by all of Google's different products and services.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But back to the 90s when not much of that stuff existed.
