There is a real sense of loyalty to Page and Brin at Google. Their vision has made Googlers obscenely rich. Employees love the freedom that the 20 percent time and generous benefits grant. Like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, their knowledge can be intimidating, though terror is not commonly part of their motivational arsenal. Their approach can be subtle. Sheryl Sandberg recalled a project she supervised in her role as vice president, global online sales and operations. The story she related could be interpreted as an illustration of a company careless about how much is spent, or as a reason employees like Sandberg saluted the founders. At the time, her project awarded free search ads to nonprofit groups. “Some companies would be worried about the bottom line. Larry and Sergey just wanted to know why the program was not bigger, faster,” she said. She increased the size of the effort-too fast, it turned out. “We were giving much more ad inventory to a handful of nonprofits than we should have.” She trekked to the founders’ office in Building 43 to explain. Page was there alone, and she explained her “really big mistake,” said she “should have noticed,” and apologized.
Page interrupted her, she recalled. “He said, ‘I’m so glad these are the kinds of mistakes you’re making because it means you’re moving quickly and doing too much. I’m going to be very upset when the mistakes you’re making are by going too slowly and missing opportunities.”’ She volunteered a ten-point plan to avoid similar mistakes, asking if he wanted to review it.
“No, I totally trust you,” he told her.
Of course, clarity is not a trait unique to Google’s founders. Steve Jobs has demonstrated prescience with several transformative innovations: the first Macintosh, Pixar, the iPod and iTunes, and now the iPhone. Bill Gates was clear about the value of software, a clarity IBM lacked when it ceded the operating system to Microsoft. By insisting that craigslist.org be a free site for most classified ads, Craig Newmark knew, he said, that by sacrificing revenues “people saw values we believed in and picked up on it.” He knew he was building trust.
Page and Brin’s clarity was abetted by the CEO they chose as their partner, Eric Schmidt. Aside from the bumps they had the first few years, it is the overwhelming opinion of those who work with them that the three men have a smooth working relationship. Sheryl Sandberg observed that the reason the troika “works is that whoever you go to for an answer, that answer sticks.” When you have two parents, a child can usually play one off against the other, she said. But at Google even if one of the three disagrees, he will back the decision. Brin said of Schmidt, “Eric is the leader for the company. Larry and Eric and I all share in the top-level leadership, but mostly Eric takes on the hardest challenges. Larry and I can spend more time on products and technology.”
Success in the Valley requires more than good engineers and passion, said Bill Campbell, pointing to the brilliant engineers and divided management that could not save Netscape, or how the passion of founder Jonathan Abrams, who founded Friendster, the pioneer social network site, was no substitute for missing management, and is a reason Friendster was eclipsed by Facebook. “I can’t imagine that anyone could have done what Eric has done. He matches what this company needs. You’ve got founders that have their unique passions, and they have an unusual amount of strategic insight. Applying that to a business model and making sure that the trains are running on time-and at the same time never losing the technology vision-is a feat. Eric’s technology skills mean that no one can bullshit him. You can bullshit me. I’m not an engineer.”
Being an engineer, alone, is not enough. Oracle has thrived for a long time as a company founded and headed by Larry Ellison, who is not an engineer. Ditto Apple under Steve Jobs. This point is made by Dan Rosensweig, the former COO of Yahoo who is today the CEO of Activision Blizzard’s Guitar Hero franchise. What makes a successful CEO, he said, “is a balanced appreciation” of the many factors, including engineering, an entrepreneurial and business culture, plus good management. In defense of his friend Terry Semel, he added, “When Terry ran a movie studio he wasn’t a director or an actor. Yet he and Bob Daly ran one of the great studios.”
The youth of the founders sometimes leads to sneering that an adult like Schmidt was essential to managing Google. “It borders on insulting to say that Eric provides ‘adult supervision.’ It is insulting to both,” Elliot Schrage said. Yet there are times when Schmidt does supervise, playing a role he likens to “a catcher” who retrieves “loose balls.” For example, at the conclusion of a Google Zeitgeist conference, the founders and Schmidt hosted a lunch for fewer than a dozen journalists in a conference room on campus. In an earlier interview, I had asked Schmidt how he felt about the federal Patriot Act, which grants the president superseding power to tap phones or e-mails to investigate potential terrorism. “I’m not a big fan,” Schmidt said. “I’m offering you my personal opinion as a citizen.” At the press lunch, the three men sat at the head of a long table, and as a preface to a question I mentioned that two years earlier Google had challenged a Justice Department subpoena that the company share information about search queries involving pornography, and Google took them to court and won. Given that, I asked, what was Google’s posture toward the Patriot Act?
“I’m not an expert on the Patriot Act,” Brin began, “but it’s certainly a long-standing issue prior to the Patriot Act…”
“Can I?” Schmidt interrupted. Not waiting for permission, he proceeded to say: “The best way to answer this question is to say it’s the law of the land and we have to follow it.”
“Or in some cases we fought it in court,” Brin began again, referring to the court victory on whether Google must turn over search requests involving pornography. Again, Schmidt interrupted, steering Brin away from any possible don‘t-be-evil proclamations. Schmidt said, “We fought it legally, and we followed the law, and we won in court.”
There are times when Schmidt appears obsequious to the founders, as when he introduced Page at the annual meeting of Google shareholders as “the best business partner in the world.” But then, “every once in awhile,” a Google executive said, “he does this unintentional condescending thing, and he does it in public settings.”
What Schmidt clearly brought to Google was experience the founders lacked. Experience often brings seasoned judgment. “Eric is the person who said, ‘We did this at Sun,”’ said Sandberg. “Eric instilled some business discipline. Before Eric started, our engineering team was going to build a finance system.” She recalled that he told them “This is not a good use of our resources. We’ll buy the software program.” Michael Moritz, who as a director was unhappy with Schmidt’s toughness during his first year at the helm, now said, “I’ve become a huge cheerleader and fully paid-up member of his fan club. He’s done the most important thing for a chief executive, and that’s to recruit and lead a wonderful management team.”
Andrew Lack, then the chairman and CEO of Sony Music, who is a friend of Schmidt‘s, remembers an incident at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the chairman of the New York Times Company and publisher of its flagship newspaper, spoke at a dinner attended by Schmidt and about fifty media executives and journalists. Schmidt remembers the evening vividly, thinking, “I was the guest.” What he did not know, said Lack, was that he “would become a target.” Sulzberger, who despite his august position can be surprisingly supercilious, rose and accused Google of “stealing his business,” his advertisers, his content. Sulzberger has another side, as a staunch defender of journalistic values-a reason many in the Times newsroom believe he nobly stands between them and the financial barbarians-and he then made an eloquent plea for the importance and future of newspapers, before coming back to Schmidt and underscoring his animus toward Google.