Semel had huge gaps in his knowledge of the digital world and of Yahoo. He was shocked to learn that Yahoo had lost ninety-eight million dollars the year he arrived. Ron Conway recalled a dinner with Semel on his first day at Yahoo. He said, “Semel did not know Yahoo owned part of Google” in the form of the warrants it banked when it signed its search engine contract with Google. An avid deal maker, Semel became intrigued by Google, particularly after Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo’s founders, urged him, he recalled, to “go meet these guys.”
Semel joined Page, Brin, and Schmidt for dinner in the Google cafeteria. Semel began the discussion: “Help me with something. We’re your biggest customer in the world, right? We both know what we pay you for the whole world is less than ten million dollars, right?”
“Yes,” they concurred.
“So what’s your business?” Semel asked. “You don’t really have a business.”
“We love what we do,” Page and Brin responded.
“Maybe we should buy your company?” said Semel, who thought it was enough of a business to throw out a billion-dollar purchase price tag.
“No, no. We don’t really want to sell our company.”
Semel walked away convinced “one hundred percent they did not want to sell.” He also walked away with assurances from Schmidt that Google was working on “their own technology” to monetize search. Later that year, when Overture approached Yahoo with their patented monetization technology and offered Yahoo a revenue guarantee, Semel signed a contract for Overture to sell its ads. Google was upset, but Semel said that in the first full year, Overture generated two hundred million dollars of advertising revenues. By 2003, Overture separately approached Yahoo and Microsoft with an offer to be acquired. Microsoft declined to bid. (They later reversed course and started up their own search engine.) In the end, Semel acquired two search engines, Overture and Inktomi, and Yahoo dropped its search license agreement with Google. (It was beginning to become clear what a colossal blunder it had been for Yahoo to farm out search in order to focus on building its portal traffic, relegating Yahoo to a weak second place in search. By buying Overture, Yahoo also inherited its April 2002 patent infringement lawsuit against Google.)
Google was growing fast, and the founders worried they’d divide into cliques and lose their cohesive culture. Stacy Sullivan, who had been hired in 1999 as the first employee in human resources, and Joan Braddi, Omid Kordestani’s trusted deputy, were asked to assemble a disparate group of early Googlers to devise a coherent mission statement of core principles the company could embrace. Twelve employees gathered in the cafe, each from a different department. The discussion went in circles for several hours, with Sullivan dutifully writing cliches on a whiteboard. Some wanted the group to enunciate a set of rules: Don’t mistreat people; Don’t be late; Don’t lose user focus; Play hard but keep the puck down. The engineers in the room weren’t interested in codified dos and don‘ts because they reeked of corporate America and offended their sense of efficiency. They also took too long to read. After hours of exasperating discussion, Paul Buchheit blurted, “All of these things can be covered by just saying ’Don’t be evil.”‘
Within a day, engineer Amit Patel, Google employee number 7, wrote the slogan in impeccable handwriting on whiteboards all over Google’s offices. The slogan became viral. When opposing an idea at internal meetings, Googlers would proclaim, “That could be evil.” The slogan became Google’s rallying cry, a way to distinguish itself from other corporations and Microsoft in particular, a way to harness the goodwill Google enjoyed as a free service bringing the world’s information to everyone’s fingertips. To former Intel chairman and CEO Andy Grove, the slogan was too vague to define a boundary, and smacked of self-righteousness. “Do you think Hitler thought he was evil?” Grove said he thought at the time. “It’s too vague, too self-serving, self-defining. ‘I’m not evil, therefore I’m not evil.’”
Eric Schmidt was happy with the slogan, though, and happy with what he was accomplishing at Google. Years later, he sat on one of three canvas-backed directors chairs jammed into the closet-sized conference room dubbed “the directors room” that is next to his office in Building 42. The view from a narrow vertical window overlooked a Google parking lot; the white brick wall to his left held a whiteboard containing mathematical formulas; to his right were several framed newspaper clippings, including one headlined “The Grown-Up at Google.” He admitted to feeling that he had grown as an executive since his days at Novell. “Most people who worked with me ten years ago,” Schmidt said, “would have said, ‘He’s smart, a nice guy, but he can’t lead.’ What is the distinction between then and now? Toughness.”
Back in 2001, his “toughness” was circumscribed. He did not issue orders to the founders, he had to persuade, to prioritize his concerns, and pick his battles. There were palpable tensions-the founders would sometimes loudly explode in meetings that the company was becoming bureaucratic, and Schmidt knew he was the target. These were three strangers working together, and the founders were uncomfortably ceding some management control over their invention, their baby. Schmidt knew the founders did not blame each other. There was rarely a hint of tension between Page and Brin-“In all the years I’ve worked with them,” said John Doerr, who is a Google director, “I’ve never seen them get angy with each other.” But it was not unusual, said another early investor, to witness emotional outbursts by the founders aimed at others, and to see these outbursts fielded and defused by the calm, self-effacing Schmidt. The go-slow, relaxed way that Schmidt approached the founders or changed the management meetings or eventually chased a squatter from his office was at times exasperating to others. While describing Schmidt as “the unsung hero” of Google, Shriram admits, “He had a slow start.” The founders at first, he said, “challenged everything,” and openly wondered: “Could they trust his judgment?” Meanwhile, the VCs were pushing for a revenue plan. And Moritz was skeptical that Schmidt was the right man to bully it through Google.
Schmidt needed help to lower the emotional temperature, and to upgrade Google’s management. That help came in the form of Bill Campbell, then sixty-one, a barrel-chested man known throughout Silicon Valley as “the coach.” At one time Columbia University ’s head football coach, Campbell had also been a senior executive at Apple and a CEO of several Valley companies, including the Go Corporation and Intuit, the now-thriving online software company that provides financial services to individuals and small businesses and where he worked side by side with the founder. John Doerr knew that Campbell felt an obligation to give back to a Silicon Valley that had made him rich enough to own his own Gulfstream IV His discretion is legendary, and part of his allure. Aside from a profile in the magazine of his alma mater, the only other time he has ever been profiled was in a superb 2008 Fortune magazine piece by Jennifer Reingold titled, “The Secret Coach.” His many friends offered tributes but Campbell would not sit for an interview. A Google search retrieves very few Campbell press mentions.