Larry Page and Sergey Brin were once invited to dine with the Duke of Edinburgh at St James’s Palace. The internet billionaires who had created Google were brought soufflés accompanied by tiny glasses of passion fruit syrup to pour over them. But Mr Page picked up the glass and downed it like a shot of tequila. Mr Brin followed suit. The Duke was apparently “stunned”.
When the pair were told later by Marissa Mayer, a colleague who witnessed the scene, that the usual protocol was using the syrup to adorn the dessert, they responded: “Who says?”
The anecdote, revealed in a new book about the internet company, is central to understanding Google’s founders and how their inquiring and contrary instincts enabled them to transform a university research project into a world-changing phenomenon.
In the Plex by Steven Levy, a leading technology writer, which is published in the US next week and arrives in Britain next month, is the result of unprecedented access to the company’s key players, including Mr Page and Mr Brin. The book provides fresh colour and perspective on the growth of the world’s largest internet company.
One of the central tales is how the founders’ relationship with Steve Jobs, of Apple, which began as something of a love affair, is now tainted by bitterness and recrimination.
In Google’s earliest days, before it figured out how to turn web searches into a cash cow through advertising, the fledgeling company’s investors decided that the young founders needed “adult supervision”. They said that Google needed an experienced chief executive to help to grow the business.
But the founders believed they could run Google themselves. So in order to persuade them, the investors organised a “magical mystery tour of high-tech royalty”, including industry leaders such as Mr Jobs, Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, and Andy Grove, of Intel.
Afterwards, Mr Page and Mr Brin accepted the need for a chief executive, but they had only one person in mind: Mr Jobs. The request was akin to a non-league football team targeting José Mourinho to be its new manager. In the end, they settled on Eric Schmidt, a Silicon Valley veteran.
However, Mr Jobs admired the search company and acted as a mentor to the founding pair. Their businesses shared advisers and Mr Schmidt was invited on to Apple’s board. But once Google had purchased and developed Android, a new operating system for mobile phones, the relationship broke down. Mr Jobs saw Android as a threat to the Apple iPhone. He felt betrayed.
In the summer of 2008, Mr Jobs visited the Googleplex — as Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, is known — to be shown Android. He was apparently furious at what he saw, believing Google had stolen Apple’s best ideas. In Android’s first versions,
Mr Jobs demanded that certain features be omitted, such as the “pinchand-zoom” gestures that had wowed many who use the iPhone.
A year later, Mr Schmidt left Apple’s board. Mr Jobs had somehow managed to keep hidden from him the development of its ground-breaking iPad. Mr Jobs later said: “Apple didn’t enter the search business, so why did Google get into the phone business?” and went on to describe Google’s “Don’t be evil” corporate motto as “bullshit”.
Rather than a betrayal, Google’s entry into the phone business is better seen as a part of the company’s boundless ambition and the unpredictable new directions they wanted to take. This has much to do with how unconventional the two men are.
In January 2006, Mr Page was due to give a speech at the annual Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. He said that he wanted to come on to the stage on the roof of a robot-controlled Volkswagen. But he was told that it would be impossible to get insurance for a billionaire riding into an crowded auditorium on top of a driverless car.
In the book, the two men are shown as passionate, smart, but also a little geeky. Mr Brin once asked a colleague if he had heard of the guitarist Carlos Santana, whom he was due to introduce at a concert. “Everyone knows who Carlos Santana is,” said the staffer. “I’ll just say he needs no introduction,” Mr Brin responded.
Though the company’s mission was to make all the world’s information accessible to everyone, Google guards its own secrets closely. Between 2001 and 2004, its biggest was just how much money it was making. Google did not want to awaken the slumbering beast of Microsoft, which it feared may create a rival search engine, so Google never touted its financial numbers — a plan that Mr Schmidt called its “hiding strategy”. That ended on April 1, 2004, before the company was to offer shares publicly.
Important bankers were invited to Google to be told about its profits and revenues. They were first shown a slide that suggested Google’s business was solid but not spectacular. Then the company’s chief finance officer, George Reyes, showed the true figures, knowing that they exceeded the wildest of expectations. It was an April fool’s joke.
Google has been no stranger to controversy, especially when it comes to its privacy policies. When an engineer created its Gmail service, many inside the company were uneasy that the system analysed the text of e-mails in order to provide targeted adverts alongside the messages.
This feature caused a wave of protest when Gmail was launched in 2004, the most serious from Liz Figueroa, a Californian state senator. She introduced a local law to ban targeted adverts.
In response, Google asked Al Gore, the former US VicePresident and a Google adviser, to meet her. He “launched into a defence of Gmail nearly as elaborate as the climate change slideshow that would later help him share the Nobel Peace Prize”. Ms Figueroa eventually produced a watered-down version of the Bill that would allow the kind of scanning that occurred in Gmail. The Bill never became law.
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