“Overture offered more money,” said former AOL president Robert Pittman. But Google offered a better search engine, a more inventive approach to reaching smaller advertisers, and higher minimum guaranteed payments.
Google won the bid, to the surprise of many industry watchers. It was a milestone, “probably the biggest” deal Google has ever done, Brin said. “Every time you did a search on AOL, it said ‘Powered by Google,’” recalled Nick Grouf, CEO of Spot Runner, an Internet based advertising agency. “By cutting a deal with Google, what AOL did was surrender the front door to its walled garden” of consumer data. The deal “affected how we thought about doing partnerships and deals,” said Tim Armstrong. And the partnership would become a huge moneymaker for both Google and AOL.
The deal enlarged Google’s appetite. Schmidt remembers the day in 2002 he walked into Page’s office and Page surprised him by showing off a book scanner he had built. It had been inspired by the great library of Alexandria, erected around 300 B.C. to house all the world’s scrolls. Page had used the equivalent of his own 20 percent time to construct a machine that cut off the bindings of books and digitized the pages. “What are you going to do with that, Larry?” Schmidt asked.
“We’re going to scan all the books in the world,” Page said. For search to be truly comprehensive, he explained, it must include every book ever published. He wanted Google to “understand everything in the world and give it back to you.” Sort of “a super librarian,” he said. “Where are all the books?” Page asked.
“The Library of Congress,” Schmidt said.
“Good, we’ll do a deal with the Library of Congress!” Page said.
“You’re Larry,” Schmidt said. “Nobody gives a shit about you.”
“Well, how can we get to the Library of Congress?” Page asked.
They arrived at the answer simultaneously.
“We call up Al Gore,” Schmidt said. “He’s friends with the guy who’s in charge of the Library of Congress.” At the same time, Page proposed to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, that Google would pay to digitize the seven million books in its library. After Page had the university’s consent, he flew to Washington to make a deal with the Library of Congress. Google would soon sign up Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library, among others. They established an internal team under the joint direction of Dan Clancy, who had a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and had worked at NASA, and Adam Smith, a former investment banker who had served as vice president of new media at Random House. Clancy offered another reason to support the effort: to promote reading among young people who did their reading online. “I sampled college students and asked, ‘How many of you went to a library in the last year?”’ Only half raised their hand. “There’s so much information on the Web that students accept secondary sources.” He hoped to combat this. Adam Smith saw their effort “as a book-promoting vehicle,” bringing the work of authors to a wider audience. About 90 percent of the more than twenty million books ever published were out of print, and Sandler and Smith had a goal of digitizing ten thousand books each day.
But in their rush to fulfill this mission, Google did not first pause to extensively consult with American publishers and authors who owned the copyrights to many of these books. “If we had done that,” Brin said, “we might not have done the project.” Because they didn’t do that, Google would later have a lawsuit to contend with.
THE FOUNDERS USUALLY FOCUS on different things. Page devotes more time to how consumers interact with Google, hence his chosen title, president of products. Brin spends more time on technology, hence his title, president of technology. The titles can be misleading, because “we overlap a lot,” said Brin. It’s also inexact because each founder has unpredictable interests or quirks. Brin, for example, thrusts himself into the middle of strategy sessions for many business negotiations, which is welcomed by his fellow executives. He is also a principal proponent, according to vice president of people operations Laszlo Bock, of Google’s massage programs and child care centers, while Page is more assertive about which engineers to hire, the food served, and the size of cafeterias. Within Google, this sometimes creates confusion. For example, Bill Campbell, who is in many of the key meetings, said he believes Brin is most focused “on the end user experience” and that Page is more focused on “the product development process to get there.” On the other hand, employee number 1, Craig Silverstein, thinks Brin “brings more of an operational focus.”
“We’re pretty lucky because we have both of us plus Eric,” said Brin. “We are able to choose the things to focus on. It’s a great luxury.” Because “I can’t escape being a bit of a tech nerd,” Brin said, he spends a lot of time on technology. But so does Page. “These things are subtle. We overlap a lot.”
What both bring, said Nick Fox, the group business manager, ads quality, is “an ability to push you down paths you wouldn’t have thought about before.” When Fox first joined Google and watched Page and Brin at TGIF, “I thought they must be two guys who had a great idea and got lucky.” But he quickly concluded they always had “great insights,” and an ability to provoke thought. He offers this example: They were in a meeting discussing new ways to advertise with search and how to move beyond the text ads Google relied upon. Brin was holding a plastic bottle of water, and said, “Let’s turn this bottle upside down. If I’m a butcher and I’m trying to get customers into my store, maybe a text ad is not an effective way to get customers into my store. But maybe if I was able to film a video of myself showing all the fresh food and great prices and I’m just talking about my store with a lot of passion, maybe this is the way I can get people to come into my store.” It was not the typical auto dealer ad announcing a President’s Day sale, Fox said. “You don’t think about ads of people talking passionately about their store.” For various reasons, such ads are still not part of search, but to Fox that is less important than the ability of the founders to “turn the way people think about something upside down.”
Alissa Lee encountered this upside-down approach. In the first five years of Google’s life, one or both founders insisted on interviewing each applicant. Brin was introduced to a Harvard Law graduate, Alissa Lee, by David Drummond, who was the company’s outside counsel in the late nineties and became Google’s corporate counsel in 2002. Lee was a contracts lawyer, and in the course of her interview, Drummond remembers, Brin said, “‘I really need to see how you will practice law. I need you to draw me a contract. Don’t spend a lot of time on it. Draft it and send it to me and to David so we can review your work.’” And then came the Google test: “‘I need the contract to be for me to sell my soul to the devil.’” Brin remembered his request and recalled: “I just figured that if I’m interviewing an attorney I should validate their work product.”
Lee remembered repeating the question, not sure she had heard it correctly. Brin told her he wanted the contract e-mailed to him in the next thirty minutes. “Amid the surreal oddity of it all,” she recalled, “I had forgotten to ask him all sorts of lawyerly questions, like what sort of protections he needed, what conditions he wanted to attach, and what he wanted in return for his soul. But then I realized that I had missed the point. He was looking for someone who could embrace a curveball, even relish it, and thrive in the process of tackling something unexpected. I’m not sure he actually looked at what I sent him, but something in my crazy sale agreement or in my response must have satisfied him.”
“She was a clear hire,” said Drummond. Today Lee is Google’s associate general counsel.