In the Plex Quotes

“Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer. Yet there was evidence to the contrary. One day a Googler, Joe Kraus, was looking for an anniversary gift for his wife. He typed “Sixth Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas” into Google, but beyond learning that the traditional gift involved either candy or iron, he didn’t see anything creative or inspired. So he decided to change his status message on Google Talk, a line of text seen by his contacts who used Gmail, to “Need ideas for sixth anniversary gift—candy ideas anyone?” Within a few hours, he got several amazing suggestions, including one from a colleague in Europe who pointed him to an artist and baker whose medium was cake and candy. (It turned out that Marissa Mayer was an investor in the company.) It was a sobering revelation for Kraus that sometimes your friends could trump algorithmic search.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“We designed Google to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free.
- Urs Hölzle”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“It is astounding that Google, whose corporate philosophy is ‘don’t be evil,’ would enable evil by cooperating with China’s censorship policies just to make a buck,” he said in a press release. “… Many Chinese have suffered imprisonment and torture in the service of truth—and now Google is collaborating with their persecutors.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Epstein came up with an elaborate plan, including TV ads, and presented it to the board. The board rejected it.

“It really came down to this,” McCaffrey later said. “We have a limited budget. Do we want to put that money into the technology, into the infrastructure, into hiring really great people? Or do we want to blow it on a marketing campaign that we can’t measure?” Larry and Sergey told Epstein that his interim stint was over”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“You can’t argue with facts. You’re not entitled to your own facts.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“The bigger threat to Google wouldn’t be measured in dollars, but in the philosophical challenge. Could it be that social networking, rather than algorithmic exploitation of the web’s intelligence, would assume the central role in people’s online lives? Even if that were not the case, Facebook made it clear that every facet of the Internet would benefit from the power of personal connection. Google had been chasing a future forged out of algorithms and science fiction chronicles. Did the key to the future lay in party photos and daily status reports?”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“In April 2004, Google had one of its countless minicrises, over an anti-Semitic website called Jew Watch. When someone typed “Jew” into Google’s search box, the first result was often a link to that hate site. Critics urged Google to exclude it in its search results. Brin publicly grappled with the dilemma. His view on what Google should do—maintain the sanctity of search—was rational, but a tremor in his voice betrayed how much he was troubled that his search engine was sending people to a cesspool of bigotry. “My reaction was to be really upset about it,” he admitted at the time. “It was certainly not something I want to see.” Then he launched into an analysis of why Google’s algorithms yielded that result, mainly because the signals triggered by the keyword “Jew” reflected the frequent use of that abbreviation as a pejorative. The algorithms had spoken, and Brin’s ideals, no matter how heartfelt, could not justify intervention. “I feel like I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on the world,” he said. “It’s a bad technology practice.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Even at that early date, the basic building blocks of web search had been already set in stone. Search was a four-step process. First came a sweeping scan of all the world’s web pages, via a spider. Second was indexing the information drawn from the spider’s crawl and storing the data on racks of computers known as servers. The third step, triggered by a user’s request, identified the pages that seemed best suited to answer that query. That result was known as search quality. The final step involved formatting and delivering the results to the user.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“[Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Inherently, Larry & Serge aren't paper-oriented - they're product oriented. If they have another 10 minutes, they want to make something better. They don't want to take 10 minutes to tell you something they did.
- Terry Winograd”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“The basic requirements were sky-high intelligence and unquenchable ambition. A more elusive criterion was one’s Googliness.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“more than solve them faster. You can tackle problems that haven’t even been considered. You can build your own paradigms”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“the idea to other handset manufacturers. Even though he was offering something for free, it was a tough sell. The mobile phone world had”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“There’s a very strong belief at Google that if the product is better, people will use it anyway,” says Griffin. “You might not like not having support; you might want to talk to somebody. But are you going to stop using it? If we create better products, support isn’t a differentiating factor.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“While Google expected to make most of its money from licensing, Armstrong was told, advertising might one day account for as much as 10 to 15 percent of its revenue.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Gates’s implicit criticism of Gmail was that it was wasteful in its means of storing each email. Despite his currency with cutting-edge technologies, his mentality was anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved. He had written his first programs under a brutal imperative for brevity. And Microsoft’s web-based email service reflected that parsimony. The young people at Google had no such mental barriers.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Not long afterward, Crowley saw the first version of an Internet start-up called Twitter. The company was run by Evan Williams, the cofounder of Blogger, who had sold that firm to Google in February 2003 but left in October 2004, unhappy at the relative neglect with which it treated his service. Twitter was a dead-simple Internet and phone service that let people broadcast 140-character messages to anyone who chose to “follow” the stray thoughts of a given user. Crowley began sending emails to people at Google telling them that this was important and Google should jump on it. “It all fell on deaf ears,” Crowley says. “They just weren’t interested in social at the time. It just wasn’t their thing.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Oddly, Orkut became a sensation in Brazil. “In Brazil, Orkut is the Internet and Google is search,” wrote one local journalist, who added that using Orkut was “like putting sugar in your coffee, watching Globo telenovelas, or heading to the beach from Christmas to Carnival.” On a trip to Brazil in 2006, Sergey Brin was asked why, and he responded, “We don’t know—what do you think?” When pressed, Googlers would refer to stereotypes of Carioca sociability, but that didn’t sufficiently explain why Orkut became the social networking choice of this country over other competitors—or why Orkut was so badly left behind in the rest of the world. Marissa Mayer’s personal analysis was based on the Google yardstick of speed. Brazilians, she says, were used to lousy Internet service and thus more tolerant of the delays. “They would just keep sitting there and waiting,” she says. Orkut was also dominant in India, where it was the number one Google service—ahead of search and Gmail. “There is no second product in India—Orkut is dominant,” said Manu Rekhi, the Orkut India product manager, in 2007. “I’ve seen beggar kids who use their money to get on Orkut.” Mayer also attributed that success to its quick response compared to other services. “Do you know why Orkut took off in India?” she would ask. “Opposite time zone, and no load on the servers at night. Speed matters.” (Why Orkut ruled in Brazil, however, was a mystery never solved.)”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Facebook was a scary competitor because in some ways it was very much like Google. True, Facebook wasn’t built on a brilliant scientific advance as Google was, and there was no technical innovation at Facebook even close to the breathtaking Google infrastructure. But Mark Zuckerberg was in the Larry Page mold, a wildly ambitious leader with a quasi-religious trust in engineering. Zuckerberg said that Facebook would have hacker values. Ten years younger than Page and Brin—a generation in Internet time—Zuckerberg respected Google’s values but believed that the older company had lost its nimbleness and focus. He made a specialty of hiring Google people who sought the excitement of building something new. When Zuckerberg needed a strong number two to run Facebook operations, he turned to Sheryl Sandberg, who had built Google’s ad organization. As disappointing as that was to Google, what was even more alarming was the competition for engineering talent. Google could deal with its most brilliant engineers leaving to start their own companies—classic examples were the departure of Paul Buchheit (Gmail) and Bret Taylor (Google Maps) to start a company called FriendFeed. But when Facebook bought FriendFeed, both engineers happily integrated themselves into the ranks of their new employer.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“The meeting was just ending when Doerr asked a final question: “How big do you think this can be?” “Ten billion,” said Larry Page.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Or, as Eric Schmidt told a reporter when asked just how Google determines the application of its famous unofficial motto, “Evil is what Sergey says is evil.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Arthur Clarke once remarked that the best technology was indistinguishable from magic.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely,”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Meanwhile, Page pushed for a test that prospective investors would be required to pass: answer three questions about Google, just to make sure that you understand the company and aren’t just making a trendy bid. It was the closest he could come to demanding potential investors’ SAT scores. The SEC nixed the idea.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“An integral part of a public offering is a “road show,” during which company leaders pitch their prospects to bankers and investment gurus. Brin and Page refused to see themselves as supplicants. According to Lise Buyer, the founders routinely spurned any advice from the experienced financial team they’d hired to guide them through the process. “If you told them you couldn’t do something a certain way, they would think you were an idiot,” she says. The tone of the road-show presentations was set early, as Brin and Page introduced themselves by first names, an opening more appropriate for bistro waiters than potential captains of industry. And of course they weren’t attired like executives—the day of their presentation of Google’s case to investors was one more in a lifetime of casual dress days for them. Google had prepared a video to promote the company, but viewers considered it amateurish. It was poorly lit and wasn’t even enlivened by the customary upbeat musical sound track. Though anyone who read the prospectus should have been prepared for that, some investors had difficulty with the heresy that Google was willing to forgo some profits for its founders’ idealistic views of what made the world a better place. On the video Brin cautioned that Google might apply its resources “to ameliorate a number of the world’s problems.” Probably the low point of the road show was a massive session involving 1,500 potential investors at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Brin and Page caused a firestorm by refusing to answer many questions, cracking jokes instead. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Some investors sitting in the ballroom began speculating with each other whether the executives had spent any time practicing the presentation, or if they were winging it.” The latter was in fact the case—despite the desperate urging of Google’s IPO team, Page and Brin had refused to perform even a cursory run-through.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“In his “Owner’s Manual to Google,” Page put front and center the unofficial motto of Google, “Don’t be evil.” “We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place,” he wrote. “We believe strongly that in the long term we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and broadly shared within the company.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Even more controversial was Google’s insistence on relying on academic metrics for mature adults whose work experience would seem to make college admission test scores and GPAs moot. In her interview for Google’s top HR job, Stacy Sullivan, then age thirty-five, was shocked when Brin and Page asked for her SAT scores. At first she challenged the practice. “I don’t think you should ask something from when people were sixteen or seventeen years old,” she told them. But Page and Brin seemed to believe that Google needed those … data. They believed that SAT scores showed how smart you were. GPAs showed how hard you worked. The numbers told the story. It never failed to astound midcareer people when Google asked to exhume those old records. “You’ve got to be kidding,” said R. J. Pittman, thirty-nine years old at the time, to the recruiter who asked him to produce his SAT scores and GPA. He was a Silicon Valley veteran, and Google had been wooing him. “I was pretty certain I didn’t have a copy of my SATs, and you can’t get them after five years or something,” he says. “And they’re, ‘Well, can you try to remember, make a close guess?’ I’m like, ‘Are you really serious?’ And they were serious. They will ask you questions about a grade that you got in a particular computer science class in college: Was there any reason why that wasn’t an A? And you think, ‘What was I doing way back then?”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Page once said that anyone hired at Google should be capable of engaging him in a fascinating discussion should he be stuck at an airport with the employee on a business trip. The implication was that every Googler should converse at the level of Jared Diamond or the ghost of Alan Turing. The idea was to create a charged intellectual atmosphere that makes people want to come to work.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Discipline must come through liberty…. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Everyone is talking about what’s going on with sales, and Sergey was paying no attention, just pushing buttons on the AV system and trying to unscrew a panel to understand it,” says Levick. “And I remember thinking, this man does not give a rat’s ass about this part of the business. He doesn’t get what we do. He never will. That set the tone for me very early in terms of the two Googles—the engineering Google and this other Google, the sales and business side.” No matter how much you exceeded your sales quota, a salesperson wouldn’t be coddled as much as a guy with a computer science degree who spent all day creating code. And some tried-and-true sales methods were verboten. For instance, golf outings. “Larry and Sergey hate golf,” says Levick. “Google has never sponsored a golf event and never will.” There would be days when Google salespeople would call agencies and discover that everybody was off on a golf retreat with Yahoo. But Tim Armstrong would tell his troops, “They have to take people on golf outings because they have nothing else.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives