Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>Ben Fried: I'm Ben. I work in Corp Eng, but this is Steven Levy, the author of--
[applause]
>>Steven Levy: Thank you.
>>Ben Fried: the author of "In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives."
Let me read you the biographical sketch of Steven that appears at the end of the book.
You're more handsome in person than you are in the picture.
>>Steven Levy: Oh, well thank you.
[laughter]
>>Ben Fried: It's a handsome photo.
>>Steven Levy: That's a good photographer, there.
>>Ben Fried: It is a good photographer, but life has been kind to you as well. So--
[laughter]
Steven Levy--. That was not insulting. That was meant in the most complimentary terms.
I feel terrible now.
>>Steven Levy: I didn't take it that way.
>>Ben Fried:
[reads passage] "Steven Levy has covered Google for more than
a decade. First at Newsweek, where he was Senior Editor and Chief Technology Writer,
and now at Wired where he is Senior Writer. He's also written about Apple, "Insanely Great,"
and "The Perfect Thing," and is the author of the classic book, "Hackers: Heroes of the
Computer Revolution." He lives in New York with his wife and son."
[ends passage]
So, I do have to add, on a personal note, you've heard me say this before, I think.
But the reason I am here today, like at Google doing my thing, is because I read this book
in the year between high school, the summer between high school and college.
And it changed my life and gave me a sense of direction and what I wanted to be. And
so, I reread it every--. The first time I found out I was gonna meet Steven, I brought
it with me to show him--I still have the first edition--how much it means. He was graceful
enough to sign it. Gracious enough to sign it. But it was--.
That's why I'm here. Anyways, so I think the thing for us to do is open it up to questions.
Although, I guess by way of introduction, you did a lot of interviews for this book,
right?
>>Steven Levy: Right. Yeah.
>>Ben Fried: Over many years.
>>Steven Levy: Lemme talk, maybe I should talk about how I went into this book--
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>Steven Levy: and got this. So I've been covering Google for quite a while. The first
time I actually went to Google was in 1999. I had seen the search engine, I think, probably
it was around the end of 1998. So, I know I mentioned it in a story in February 1999.
And for a while, Google had a little newsletter they sent out about their news hits. And in
the very first one that was sent out, they mentioned that little mention I did in Newsweek.
But I realized at a certain point during 1999, this wasn't just a cool product. This was
something that was transformative. And besides the product being worth seeing, the company
itself was something I really should know.
So I called up the head of PR at the time, who I had known 'cause she had worked at Apple,
Cindy McCaffrey, and said, "I really wanna meet these guys." And she said, "Next time
you're out, come by." And I did that. And it was October of 1999. I know it was October
because when I got there, and it was in the original Googleplex on Bay Shore, everyone
was in costume.
[Ben Fried laughs]
It was almost Halloween. And Larry was dressed as a Viking. He had a big furry vest--
[laughter]
a hat with big horns out of it. And Sergey was dressed like a cow.
[laughter]
And he had these disgusting udders coming out of his chest.
[Ben Fried laughs]
[laughter]
So the Viking and the cow took me into a room and explained Page Rank to me. And --
[laughter]
So I knew that was something different. So I kept covering Google and I did a cover story
and other big stories for Newsweek. And always thought that it would be great to write a
book about Google. But I know there were a couple books out around the IPO period and
they did a pretty good job.
And I wondered, "How do I do this?" And then, in the summer of 2007, I took a trip with
some of the APMs at Google. Do you all know what the APM is? Yeah, yeah, you all know,
right. And so, there's this trip that Marissa takes the APMs on, the international trip.
And in this case, we literally went around the world.
We started in San Francisco, went to Tokyo, Beijing, Bangalore, and Tel Aviv. And for
16 days, I was 24/7 with these great, young people--the young leaders of Google, the future.
And being immersed among them was fascinating to me. I realized there was a dimension of
Google, which I have never seen portrayed publicly. There's something else was going
on inside here.
It was a generational thing. It was a thing about how people who really understand the
internet make the use of it and bring it to all of us. And it's something about the unique
ambitions and goals and struggles of this company.
So I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting if I could do a whole book from that inside
perspective and as much as possible, learn firsthand in a deep way, what's going on here
at Google for the areas that interest me most."
And they're broken up in chapters. It's amazing how closely these chapters represent the outline
that I did when I was first pitching the book. And the people in charge of communications,
then Elliot Schrage, was Head of Communications, he told me then if I agreed to let Google
check everything, give Google approval of everything, he’d give me a badge. I didn't
get a badge.
[Ben Fried laughs]
And but it went up to LSE, which is one of many acronyms I've learned—Larry and Sergey,
and Eric. And they signed off on it. And I started seriously in June 2008, just about
the same time I began at Wired, which I left Newsweek that spring to go full-time at Wired.
And I was able to talk to pretty much anyone I wanted. That was the best part there. And
I could say, "Steve , here's an interesting person. Could I talk to this person?" Or Karen
Wickre, who was my shepherd there, would say, "Here's a really interesting person for you
to talk to." And she would put me together with like George Salah, who was a head of
all the facilities there.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>Steven Levy: And he was the guy who Google hired. There were a number of hires early
in Google who were the kind of people a small start-up had no business hiring, like a facilities
guy when they had like ten people, right?
[laughter]
And he found the places there. And one of my favorite things that he said to me was
that "Larry smells things that other people can't smell." And he was going through and
they were redoing Building 43 and Larry was very sensitive to non-organic things in there
or something. But he explained to me the design philosophy behind Google's buildings and things
like that.
And of course, I really wanted to spend a lot of time with people in Search and Ads,
and get an understanding of how those things went, because to me, these are characters
as much as the people. The leaders are characters. And learning about how Search works and Ads
work, you learn a lot about Google's values and their approach and how they view the world
and how they view the internet.
So with that access, I was able to do this book. Otherwise, it was a non-starter there.
>>Ben Fried: So it sounds like an unprecedented level of access. What was kind of the most
surprising or interesting thing that you learned, or unexpected?
>>Steven Levy: Well, there were a lot. You go into it saying, "I wanna learn stuff."
Right? And one surprising thing was everyone talks about the chaos at Google. And even
leaders evoke it. And they say, "Well, it's a creative chaos." Or, "We thrive on disorganization,"
and things like that.
And indeed, one engine of that chaos or disorganization, whatever you wanna call it, was the Montessori
training of Larry and Sergey. I think it was Marissa who said to me, "You can't understand
Google unless you know that Larry and Sergey both went to Montessori." And I asked both
of them individually about that.
And they -- both of them acknowledge that had something to do with their outlook and
the way they still operate in the company. And I've noticed certainly figures out in
the way that they’re perapatric. They just kind of go around the company. I think Larry
is a little bit--. Now that he's the CEO, may not have the freedom that he and Sergey
had been enjoying to pretty much go anywhere they wanted at any time.
But that was part of it. But also, on the other hand, Google has a lot of internal structures
to monitor people. Now, I had never heard of OKRs [Ben Fried laughs] before I went in
this book. And actually, I was quite surprised considering the degree to which it's part
of Google culture that it had never been written about.
Just Google "OKRs" in Google, you get very, very little. And that's surprising because
you folks know it's a big deal here. And people talk about their OKRs. And there's a whole
formal way you deal with OKRs and there's a sort of informal scuttlebutt on OKRs. Right?
You don't want to make your OKRs everyyear because then you're sandbagging it, right?
And so, for people like us who are YouTubing this, they're saying, "What's an OKR?"
That stands for Objective and Key Results. And it's something that John Doerr actually
first suggested when Google was very small, that they implement. Andy Grove originally
thought of the idea. But Google embraced it like no other company. And as you know, there's
quarterly OKR's, and there's yearly and sometimes division or even the whole company will have
an OKR.
And you think about it, it's not that surprising 'cause it's measurable. And Googlers love
to measure things. They love data. And they love to test and see if the data works. But
it was fascinating to me to see that and the peer reviews and other things, that there's
all these internal structures that show that Google is, in a sense, kind of organized.
[pause]
>>Ben Fried: Should we take questions from the audience? I don't know if people have
a lot of questions, if they've read the book. I could go on asking you questions.
>>Steven Levy: Yeah.
>>Ben Fried: There's a lot of people here. I'm wondering if there's--.
>>Steven Levy: Well maybe folks can come up to the mic--
>>Ben Fried: Come up to the mic if you have a question. Does anyone have a question?
>>Steven Levy: and maybe we could talk.
>>Ben Fried: Otherwise, I'll make them up. So I advise you to come up to the mic. And
while you're thinking of coming up to the mic, I've been asked to remind you all that
Steven has had an unprecedented level of access to the company, but he's still a member of
the press.
[laughter]
And so questions, questions that might perhaps unwittingly reveal things we do not want revealed
should be--
>>Steven Levy: Right.
>>Ben Fried: considered before you ask.
>>Steven Levy: I do have to tell you that it was, it was an interesting effect going
on there. Because as part of the ground rules of the book, I was allowed to see stuff that
members of the press could not see. There was an overall NDA to the book itself where
anything I gathered during the course of my research was understood that it was gonna
be embargoed until the book came out.
And people at Google knew when the book was coming out. So I could then watch the development
of certain products. The other thing that was part of it was that if a product was not
going to be out by the time my book came out, I wouldn't be able to write about it. And
there's one thing in particular--I won't even say what it is--
[laughter]
That, that it could not be in my book. And it was disappointing to me and probably even
more disappointing to the people who still haven't finished the product--
[laughter]
that that was the case.
>>Ben Fried: I wonder what that could be.
[laughter]
>>Steven Levy: I'm not gonna give a clue. But actually, there was a sort of a loophole
to that. If both sides agreed that we could go early with it, we could. And we did that
with Chrome, which I knew about well in advance--the browser. And we were able to crash a story
for Wired in a short period of time.
>>Ben Fried: Right, right.
>>Steven Levy: Which worked out really, really well to everyone's benefit there.
>>Ben Fried: What was the thing that was hardest to keep your tongue bit about, right? Of all
the two plus years, two and a half. '08 to '11, that's three years really almost. What
was the thing that you knew was coming that was hardest to bite your tongue about or not
to try to publish or tell friends about or something?
>>Steven Levy: I think just--
>>Ben Fried: You're in the job of sharing information, not hiding it, right?
>>Steven Levy: I think it wasn't one thing in particular, but just the idea that there
was so much good stuff coming out from the interviews. And I think, I guess the point
I wanted to make from your previous thing was people knew that I was in some areas where
a reporter's not supposed to be. But sometimes they assumed I was in other areas where--
[crash noise]
Uh-oh. Now they're finding out.
[laughter]
>>Ben Fried: Yeah, that's right.
[laughter]
>>Steven Levy: And so, what they would say is, [beeping noises] "Oh, so you know about
Chrome." They figured, "You know about Chrome, so I guess you know about X, Y, or Z." And
they'll say, "Well, lemme tell you, in the SkunkWorks project the other day blah, blah,
blah, blah." [Ben Fried laughs.] And I'd say, "Hmm, OK."
[laughter]
But I guess even more than that, because I mentioned LSE before. There's this whole list
of acronyms. It's sort of like the government in a sense that there's acronyms.
[laughter]
And the whole little language of Google, right?
>>Ben Fried: Oh, yeah.
>>Steven Levy: You say [thump noise] just referring, "I sold 443 and went to the GPA
and then checked with the OC." And everyone--. [Ben Fried laughs.] So, the fact that I could
speak to Googlers in that language created a comfort zone that pretty quickly, within
an interview, we reached a level of candor I think.
And I think that this was part of the plan. It wasn't putting one over on Google. I think
part of the idea of my doing this, this is, was the sense that if Google were transparent,
at least to this writer, people would learn about it. And what they'd learn would be something
that might make Google less threatening as it became a big company.
So, it's not a question that I'm putting one over on you folks, but sunlight accrues to
the benefit of Google because it's a company. And I can say pretty confidently, people here
believe that they're doing the right thing, that it's a company very much based on moral
principles.
And actually, there's a big, big thread in my book about how these moral principles play
out and how Google tries, and sometimes struggles, to uphold those moral principles--being a
big company, dealing in areas like China. And to me it's a great drama. And I think
it's terrific that these still matter at Google. And I think they do.
>>Ben Fried: A question.
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Steve thanks for coming here. Now that the book's out and people
like Charlie Rose are quizzing you about it, what's the most common, or what are the most
common things that you get about, "Wow. I did not know about that about Google," or,
"Wow. I never would have guessed that about Google."
>>Steven Levy: Well, people talk about a couple things. One would be, and the book is just
getting out now. Literally yesterday was the publication day. So, people have just been
seeing it for a week. There was an article in the New York Times that came out that sort
of summarized some things, but I don't think we get the whole context of even the things
that they mentioned, they seized on the China thing.
And really, there's new information. There's a lot in that China section. And I was really
glad that I spent a lot of time on that. I knew I wanted to do a very big internal, international
component to the book. In general, reporters I think in the United States, don't write
enough about the international aspects of the companies that they cover.
Google isn't alone of having a huge percentage of their revenues and operations overseas.
But people in the US, 'cause we're Americans, we don't focus on that stuff more. But I knew
I wanted to write about something international and I chose China as an interesting case in
point to focus on. And that turned out to be a rich area, let's say.
And I was able to tell that story. And so, some of the things there were things that
might surprise people. I think also, and I'd done some of this for Wired, just knowing
how Search and Ads work in a little more detail, the level--. And Google I know has been trying
to address this with videos and other things and being a little more open.
There's probably no two words more offensive to Google than "black box." I know those words
aren't popular around here. But so, maybe to try to decode that a little, how those
things work, and try to explain it in lay terms and add my explanations to the ones
that you folks have been doing, are sometimes surprising.
People don't really get for instance, the way Ads might work. The idea that there's
this auction that you bid on, but that the high bid isn't always the winner. How good
the ad is actually fits into all that. And to me, and to a lot of people, is totally
novel, even after all those years of--. How old is that product now? Nine years old?
But it's worth explaining and getting into because from that equation of AdWords, so
many things fall out. And in the space of a book, I had time to really talk about how
those things all work together, where the science in Search and the science in ads,
the science of AI, and the testing and the data from users all come together because
there is this holistic thing going on here that takes big arms to grasp and lots of pages.
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Thank you.
>>FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: Hi. Thanks for being here. My question is about what--. One
of the things that I love about working here is our culture. And I'm curious what really
struck you about our culture and what thoughts you might have on us keeping that culture
and maintaining it going forward 'cause it's a challenge we face?
>>Steven Levy: Right. Well, obviously I've addressed the culture a lot and one of the
things, just talking about with George about how he set up the offices and the roots of
that. Actually, he even went back to Susan Wittgiske, who said that in the original Google
office, which was her house, one day, some guy came to deliver a refrigerator to her
and her husband.
But Larry and Sergey just signed for it and said, "Put it in here." They put it on the
Google side of the building.
[laughter]
>>Ben Fried: Was that the first micro kitchen?
[laughter]
>>Steven Levy: Yes. Yeah. In a word and that was the beginning of free food at Google.
So--
>>Ben Fried: Special thanks to Susan I guess.
>>Steven Levy: Yeah, yeah. Well, to her credit she went with it and I think Google's been
good to Susan. So --
[laughter]
And vice versa. But the parts of the culture--. It's interesting 'cause when it was a small
company, of course, everyone spent time with Larry and Sergey. And Google, to a large extent,
channels Larry and Sergey's values.
And as you get to a bigger company, it gets tougher and tougher to do that. So that, the
question is how do you eventually do that? I was at -- I spoke at a gathering of the
Geo Group. A couple times I've been asked to talk to Google groups. And since Google's
talked to me so many times, I felt the least I could do was agree to those requests there.
And someone asked me, "Well, what's Larry really like?" And I thought, "What a weird
question. You work in the company there. I'm just a journalist going in there." But of
course, when you're talking about a company of 24,000 people, how many people really see
and spend time with the executives there?
And especially where's that moment in time a few years ago where Larry and Sergey dismissed
their assistants. Is this familiar to all you? Yeah. It's a classic story where--. And
Larry explained this to me. He said, "Well people have the ability to say yes to a meeting
and I didn't want that. Meetings are my least favorite thing."
And they gave themselves the freedom to just go around the company there. But of course,
people had to adjust to this because some people really wanted to talk to Larry and
Sergey, or see them. And I compared it to--. People would track them. I compared it to
people who, like the aircraft fanatics, who track planes in airports and mark down the
numbers of the planes flying.
People took note of Larry and Sergey sightings and figured out strategies to stalk them.
[laughter]
And I tell the story of one guy who came out from Zurich 'cause he really wanted to hear
from Larry about the fate of his project, whether Larry had an idea of it. And he came
from Zurich and went to a TGIF and actually talked first, talked to Sergey who said, "You
have to talk to Larry." And went to Larry in his office there and had a conversation
about that.
So, channeling those is a challenge that actually, I think, people at Google--tell me otherwise
if it's not true--have a pretty good sense of how they think. Ben?
>>Ben Fried: I may get more access to Larry and Sergey than the average Googler. Although,
I'm not so sure of that, but I might. But--
[laughter]
I think they're very open about that. Right? They're singularly open about what's on their
mind and how they approach the problem. And they don't just say what they want, but they
say why they want it and what led to that.
>>Steven Levy: Right. Right. But it's like the values of like scale and speed and ambition,
which I think are--
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>Steven Levy: just core to them, I think do get channeled throughout the company. So
that's interesting. Another aspect of the culture that I found really interesting was
the hiring practices. And I can't tell you how many people I talked to who were in their
middle ages, who were just flabbergasted when they applied for jobs at Google and had to
come up with their SAT scores, and their GPAs--
[laughter]
And actually, this is kind of interesting because Google's very, as you know, very data-oriented.
And I talked to Stacie Sullivan, the head of HR. And she said really in the studies
that they've done, they can't really prove the correlation between a super-high SAT score
and a successful Google employee. Yet that's something that remains important from what
I understand there.
I mean, I also was surprised that Larry signs off on every single employee, which is amazing
to me. I mean, he explained how he did the science of how that works, where he--. He
has a sort of like compressed version of the recruitment package, the hiring package, whatever
it's called. And he's able to go through it very quickly, but his eyeballs rest on the
recommendation to hire every single person, which is remarkable.
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: So I've had a chance to read the book. I really enjoyed it, so
thank you for writing it.
>>Steven Levy: Are you a fast reader?
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: A good bit. What didn't make it into the book, besides all
the confidential stuff? You chose specific chapters and specific topics. But what else
would you have wanted to publish?
>>Steven Levy: Hmm. Well there was quite a lot, really. I mean, actually one thing that
I spent a little time on that wound up only a couple paragraphs on, was some of the issues
of Google design and interface, which I think is really interesting.
So I sort of compressed that discussion. I really couldn't find a great place to go on
at length about it. But I find it fascinating how Google has this design philosophy, which
in some areas gets criticism. And those were from fairly well-publicized conflagrations
where designers went off in a huff saying, "Google's not friendly to designers."
But I think I got a great explanation from Margaret Stewart, who's now at YouTube, who
is a designer. And she used to work with Marissa. And Marissa once explained that in saying
that, "Basically, we want Google to look like it might have been designed by a machine."
Because what they wanna convey is that there's no bias in there.
So core to Google is the idea that this search engine is not being biased, that it's taking
the algorithms based on -- where success is based on how they measure people are happy
in the searches. And the implicit message then in design has to be well, there's no
some artist with a long moustache, Dali moustache, who's making swoops and swooshes and things
like that. But it's very clean and straightforward.
So, to me it's worthy of a longer discussion, but it just didn't make the cut. [pause]
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: Hi. I can imagine that you must have been winding up writing
the book when the WikiLeaks memos came out about Google and China. I know there's a few
that were pertinent. I'm kinda interested in your reaction to those. Like, did it, do
you feel it changed the story in any significant way?
>>Steven Levy: Well actually, it confirmed the story in a significant way. And you're
right. It was just around that time. And I was frantically trying to get hold of more
of those memos that dealt with Google. If you remember, there was a couple days where
the Times reported on some of it, but there was a gap between when WikiLeaks actually,
where then the Times produced the content of the memos themselves.
So, I was able to get those in. I don't even know if there's more to come. But some of
the things actually did just confirm from the State Department's point of view what
they were hearing from sources, stuff that I had already nailed down in China there.
So fortunately, it wasn't anything contradictory there. And also, since their stuff was sometimes
raw intelligence, it wasn't necessarily stuff you could take to the bank. So, I had to be
careful there in what I put in there and how I put it. [pause]
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #5: So, what are we bad at and what are we doing wrong? And how
can we do better?
>>Steven Levy: That's a great question. Well, I think that what I found has been a problem
in Google products is there's a lot of care in thinking of products and putting them out.
And even though there is, the philosophy is to get things out and keep working on it,
but is to deliver, to stick with products.
So, you take something like Wave, which is a really innovative product by a very innovative
team. And Google obviously clearly cared a lot about it and it was the big star of the
IO show. But to me, this was the kind of product that just would have difficulty finding its
place just on its own. And I did an interview at the Churchill Club with Ray Ozzie, not
long after Wave was announced.
They did that amazing demo if you remember that if you stuck with it for an hour and
a half, you'd understand the product. And--
[laughter]
but and Ray thought it was, there was a lot great in the product. He said the simplicity
is real important there and you have to work through it. And it really was a product that
Notes, which Ray had designed, was a good analog.
And when Notes came out, they did an incredible amount of support. They would go into a company
and work with people. And this wasn't done with Wave. And I asked Eric about this last
summer whether that might have been a case where Google should've varied from its philosophy
of putting things out. If it catches on, great.
Otherwise, failure's part of our business. And he actually stuck to the guns. He said,
"No, no. This is the way we are. That's just Google. We'll put out something and if it
doesn't catch on, OK. Failure's built in. We built our data systems so the servers can
fail and we put out products knowing some are ambitious and thy're gonna fail."
And I actually feel that it would do Google well to put more effort into supporting--and
I know this may be a bad word--marketing products like that.
[laughter]
So that's a point there. And of course, this is gonna be interesting to see as Google gets
more into Social stuff, too, because I do write about some of the missteps in Social.
And I think Orchid's another case where support could've put Google in a better position there
though it was pointed out to me that to give it the support necessary, when Google was
such a small company, you would've really had to strip out a sizeable percentage from
other teams just to give it the engineers it deserved, because a lot of the engineers
for Orchid were really concerned at that early point of moving it from the dot net code base
to what Google normally runs on.
So, but that's one that I can identify. [pause]
>>Ben Fried: So, maybe while we're waiting for another question, I had another question,
which is that I've talked to a lot of people who started from outside Google and relatively
recently moved in. And it's interesting to watch their opinions of the company change
after they acclimate to the culture and what it's like to work here and learning what goes
on behind the development curtain or something like that.
And did you have any experiences like that where you observed that your opinion of the
company, or the products or people changed as a result of the proximity that you got?
>>Steven Levy: Well, consider that my immersion into Google began around June 2008 and comes
up to now. One of the changes in Google between then and now and the changes in Google, the
perception of Google between then and now, they're really significant. So that was an
interesting time.
But what I found is that anyone who goes to Google, two years later,
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>Steve Levy: sees a different Google. Most people, during Google's history, there was
sort of a plateau in hiring around late 2008, 2009, so it didn't, for a little period didn't
grow as quickly. And this year, of course, it's gonna grow again. But if you went to
Google in 2002, two years later it was twice the size, different company.
Same with 2004, right? So no matter when you got in there, in two years you were like bemoaning
how big it's gotten, right? And then of course, the people who were there in 2002, would say,
"What were you talking about? Remember then." Right? So, and I think the big shift that
came with those years was really coping with the perception of Google.
Then, it changed. At a certain point, people saw the degree to which Google affected them,
that Google's competitors became super energized and focused on spreading the message about
the possible dangers of Google. And I think I've done a pretty good job of doing that.
And that also because of the belief from the top down that you, at Google, are doing the
right thing, you're righteous folks, sometimes you don't always appreciate the degree to
which other people are now worried about the size and the degree of information about you.
And I think the classic example of that is the repercussions from the Book Search thing,
where even though very smart people here, intellectually, everyone understands how people
are reacting to it, but there was this--just at the core--just a disbelief. Don't they
get that the great thing we're doing for civilization?
How can they be objecting to this? And you can see it in what Larry says and the Op Ed
that Sergey wrote for the New York Times.
>>Ben Fried: Right.
>>Steven Levy: I remember they had a press conference, or a press round table, just right
across the street actually. Right across the street there, on the day that Sergey did that.
And he was saying, "We're helping people. Why are they attacking us?"
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #6: Hi. I was just wondering if you could compare and contrast
Google with other large tech companies in general and maybe things that Googlers might
not themselves be aware of, because we've been customized to our surroundings.
>>Steven Levy: Well I guess the classic comparison comes with Microsoft. So, in the 1990s, Microsoft
was seen as the company that ruled all, right? And again, it was an engineering company run
by a very strong founder and -- that ran into trouble because of its power.
Now, I covered Microsoft a lot during those days. And I think there are -- while there
are strong similarities in this sense as I mentioned, there are essential differences
there. I think there's a philosophically--. Bill Gates and Larry and Sergey don't just
resonate to the same tuning fork, let's say.
[laughter]
Google is more of a bottom up company that--. Microsoft is very much--. The marching orders
come from above there and indeed, when product managers typically come from Microsoft to
Google, there's difficulties there.
As a matter of fact, in I think it was 2001. It was the inability of product managers from
places like Microsoft to fit in well into Google that led Larry and Sergey to say, "We
gotta get rid of product managers entirely. Get rid of this whole level there." Which
didn't really take and they came back. But for a little while, like literally every engineer
was reporting to Wayne Rosing, the head of engineering.
And this was a big debate that Larry felt that people don't wanna be managed. And Bill
Campbell, who had just started to advise them, said, "No, Larry. You're wrong. People do
wanna be managed." And they actually called in people, one by one. It was about 8:00 at
night. A bunch of people still working there. And they asked them, "Do you wanna be managed?
Do you wanna be managed?"
[laughter]
And people said yes, but Larry went ahead and did it anyway.
[laughter]
But then, but because of the Microsoft kind of people there. Now, as it turns out, it's
a big company. You need managers. And everyone understands that now. But still, Google has
its own kind of culture with this bottom up thing.
And I think also, just basically, if you look at just the behavior of the companies in China
now, you see a difference now. I think, to its credit, I think the ultimate outcome of
the China thing was something where the morality of what was happening there did play a role
in that. And I think particularly, from Sergey's very passionate stance that he took after
the break-in occurred there, and it was always part of the equation there.
And I asked Steve Ballmer at a conference a few months ago about his company's performance
in China. Because quite frankly, I was a little surprised to see--. To me, it was sort of
an easy shot for them to say something supportive about what Google did instead of just saying,
"Well we followed the laws of China."
Which is basically what he said. And he answered me with that, he'd say, "When I went to college,
there was this big debate about apartheid, about whether companies should support South
Africa in hopes of changing the system from within, or whether we should boycott." And
clearly, he was taking the side of saying, "Well, we're gonna support that."
Which I thought was sort of interesting because of this 2006 hearing in Congress, which was
something--you remember that? It was just on the eve of Google's entry into China, with
DotSiam and the search engine that was censored. And the hearing was led by a Congressman who
was the only Holocaust survivor ever to appear in Congress.
And he took the people from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco over the coals. Asked
each one--poor Elliot Schrage had to represent Google--each one asking, "Are you ashamed?
Are you ashamed?" And the book invoked most during that hearing was this book that had
come out about a year earlier called, "IBM and The Holocaust."
And that was the analogy that people were making there. So it seemed to me that Microsoft
might want to avoid phrases like, "We're just following the laws of the country there."
>>Ben Fried: The Lieutenant Calley defense.
>>Steven Levy: What?
>>Ben Fried: The Lieutenant Calley defense, right?
>>Steven Levy: Yeah. Yeah.
>>Ben Fried: The Watergate defense, I guess actually. I'll do it, I'll follow orders.
>>Steven Levy: So I think that – I sort of lost the thread -- the differences between,
but I think that is different. And Google now, it's a big company and there's this "don't
be evil" thing. I'm surprised we've gone this far without having that mentioned. But and
it's used quite often as a bludgeon against Google. Oh, if Google does this. You read
about that Google uses tax break.
Well, don't be evil, huh? That comes all the time. But, and I know that Cindy McCaffrey,
who was the original Head of Communications, sort of rues the day that that came out into
the mainstream. She said, "I knew once that got out, they were goooing to use it against
us there." But surprisingly, I find that in talking to a lot of people at Google who'd
been there a long time, they don't regret that.
They said they still find it useful. People don't go around saying it necessarily, but
it is something that's built in there. So I think in a positive sense, that's a difference.
That's one reason why I'm interested in the company. That it actually tries, at least
to grapple with these issues. It's not always as successful as it wants to be.
It doesn't always meet its standards, but it's in the mix. And I think that's something
special. [pause]
>>Ben Fried: So, on a slightly different note, when David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin get ready
to make the next great tech company movie--
[laughter]
who should they cast for Larry and Sergey?
>>Steven Levy: That's a good one.
That's a good one. Actually, this point came up before. And I don't know. Jake Gyllenhaal,
would he make a good Larry?
[laughter]
>>Ben Fried: I think depending on the hair, he could be Sergey. Little, little hair on
his--.
>>Steven Levy: Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I guess we'd have to google that and figure
out--. Do the image search and figure out all the good actors. I always thought that
what I would like to do is make an opera out of the China experience.
[laughter]
>>Ben Fried: Sergey in China?
>>Steven Levy: Yeah. Sergey, he went to China early, but he never visited Beijing. They
started an office there. But I picture like Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt, like pitching
arias across to each other.
And in the middle there's Kai-Fu Lee singing, "I choose Google. I choose China." And it
could be a great scene there. So, if Phillip Glass is listening, [laughter] here we go.
>>Ben Fried: [laughs] [pause] I really gotta think about that. That was deep. [Steven Levy laughs.] [pause]
What's the most interesting question you've been asked about the book so far? How's that
for a meta-question?
>>Steven Levy: Yeah. Well, I guess people wanna know how I got in there, right?
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>Steven Levy: That's a big question. And whether Google was worried about what I do.
And I think what happened was there was a certain period where I was sort of under the
radar. I mean, even though I was just there so much that--.
And another thing that was really helpful to me was the people on that APM trip. I don't
know if there are any here. I saw Prim upstairs and I saw David Henry yesterday. But there's
some people on that trip who are here in New York. They were sort of like a shadow network
for me. They weren't necessarily prominent in the book, though one of them, Dan Siroker
actually, I wrote about after he left Google and started to work for Obama for the campaign.
And I talk about how he used Google techniques to power change.org. And -- but they fanned
out to all sorts of interesting places--Chrome and Book Search, and Ads and other things.
And I would often just run into them somewhere and we'd have a really good conversation.
I'd learn what was happening there.
Not that there should be repercussions to the people who are still there. Those aren't
the ones who told me things. Hi, Craig.
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: Hi. So thanks first for allowing us to indulge in the guilty pleasure
of us asking you questions about us, but--
[laughter]
I gotta continue on the theme. There's a little bit of a variation on a theme from an earlier
question, but I think we have a lot of internal myths about what Google is like and what we
think Google is like. But you actually have seen across a broader spectrum than most of
us.
What do you think--. Are there things that you've observed that don't really gibe with
our self-image? Things that we should know that actually are not true about Google that
we think are true?
>>Steven Levy: Well, that's a good question. We talked about some of those things. But
one, I think one thing that is interesting is that--. So this is an engineering company,
but there's a lot of people who aren't engineers. So it's interesting to talk about that divide
there. And we're in New York. I don't know are there people who are Ad Sales people here?
Anyone? There you go. I actually wanted to write about some of those 'cause there's an
element--. People, journalists again, don't write very much about those people at Google
and clearly, they were important. And to me, it was fascinating at the point. There was
this thing called "Premium Sunset" where the – in AdWords took over all the ads.
It used to be that some of the ads were paid by impression and not per click. And that
was a big transformation in the ad world in general and the people working here. And I
talked about that. But also, there's – it's sort of a class system at Google. The engineers
kinda rule. And this Jeff Levick, who used to work here, once told me a story.
Early on in Google's history, where they had, there weren't too many Ad people. They went
to Mountain View and they were met in some little conference room in some budget hotel
in Mountain View. And Sergey came to the meeting. And he spent the whole meeting futzing with
the control panel of the AV thing.
[laughter]
Basically trying to see how that worked. Right?
And Jeff told me, he said--pardon the language--"That moment I realized that they don't care a rat's
*** about what we do here. That it's the engineers here." Right? But of course, they do care.
They realize how important it is for these people to explain to the clients exactly what's
happening there and give them support.
It was a different kind of relationship there. And I actually really enjoyed spending time
with them. And Tim Armstrong, actually, when I interviewed him here promised me he would
take me on a sales call to General Motors. And I was really looking forward to that.
But for reasons beyond anyone's control, he never got to take me on that sales call there.
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #8: On the Book's Search thread, it seems like we've reached the point
where there's a lot of skepticism or even hostility out there in the real world, like
the head of the Harvard Library, Scott Turow or somebody from the Author's Guild. What
do you think we could do to reassure the general public that we're not trying to monetize a
lot of other people's IP, or in general, be abusive?
Or is it just too late, that we're the Microsoft of this decade and whatever we do must, because
we're big--
>>Steven Levy: Right.
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #8: because we have deep ambitions, whatever we do must be evil?
>>Steven Levy: Well, that's a great question. And I haven't done reporting post-Judge Chin's
decision of what Google actually is thinking there. Clearly, people are sitting and trying
to figure out the answer to that question.
What I would say--. And it's interesting you mentioned the Harvard guy. Personally, I have
to say that as a writer and as an author, I am excited to see all the world's books
in one corpus that I could search and get that information, and know that something
is in a book and then maybe offering you the chance to buy it, or if it's impossible, just--
knowing it's in there and giving you a chance to find the book. And I don't mind if my book
is in there. And actually, I had a conversation with the head of the Author's Guild, of which
I'm a member, about that. And but, Google, I think, underestimated the degree of hostility
it would take, that it was Google doing this.
And like you say, the well's been poisoned to a certain degree. I think one, there's
a couple things that I would just suggest. I don't know if the people making the decision
care about it, but I'd say that maybe instead of saying that these books that we've scanned
are gonna remain only in our index, to say anyone can index them, that we could give
access to it.
Maybe if you license it. Even if you let, would let Bing or wherever else license your
stuff, maybe that wouldn't be so threatening. Personally, I thought that the greatest, the
greatest, -- the best thing to do would've been to just fight the original claim on a
fair use thing. I thought that could've been something of value for all of us to get the
fair use thing clarified on whether you could, whether scanning a book was a fair use just
for your index there.
But right now, we're sort of in a position. Everyone's sort of kicked it to Congress and
we all know how efficient a system that is in getting legislation that fits what the
public need is. So, I imagine it is frustrating. But I think that in order to do, get the log
jam out, Google's probably gonna have to make some concession there and maybe by saying,
let's say even in theory, and it's easy for me to say 'cause I didn't spend millions of
dollars scanning these books, but to say that's available.
Look -- most people do their searching from Google anyway, right? So, and that would be
sort of non-threatening. You spent the money already. Right? So, talk is cheap, but mine's
cheap, too. Except for this, of course.
[laughter]
>>Ben Fried: 12.99 on Google Books, available as of yesterday, I might add.
>>Steven Levy: Oh. Very good. [pause]
>>Ben Fried: We've gotta get the pre-ordering thing down still for that product.
>>Steven Levy: Excellent.
>>Ben Fried: [ ] zoom. Did you have another question?
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #9: You compared and contrasted Google with Microsoft. I think
one thing that Larry and Sergey has never said that I think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
have both said is--to paraphrase somewhat—'That's the stupidest f-ing idea I've ever heard.'
You talked a little bit about comparing Microsoft with Google. How would you compare Apple with
Google?
>>Steven Levy: Both companies are dramatically different. Ironically, there was a moment
in time when it looked like this would-- Apple and Google were gonna be Humphrey Bogart and
Claude Rains, just marching off into the mist of a beautiful friendship.
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #9: A beautiful friendship.
[laughter]
>>Steven Levy: Yeah. And but, that didn't happen.
[laughter]
And Apple is a consumer electronics company, essentially. It's very much focused on design--the
kind of design, which is an editorial statement. And it's relentless in the kinds of things.
Maybe that's why they're complementary in those kinds of things which would--.
Supporting the hardware, selling the hardware, which Google has not shown strength in, traditionally.
On the other hand, Google understands the internet, I think, even better than Apple.
Apple's done a pretty good job on the internet, but--. So I think, and Google is--to the degree
that they're a bottom up--is a wild contrast with a very much top down aspect of Apple.
And Apple, people are pretty much frozen until they hear what's going on from the top there.
And fortunately, the have a person at the top who's worth waiting for. His opinions
are pretty darn good. So, and just the feel of the company is different. Someone, there
was a question on Quora that I answered because someone I thought it was such an apt question
in that regard.
Someone said, "What's the difference between the Google campus and the Apple campus?" And
both of them are lovely places, but Google has sort of like a dorm feel to it. It's like
lots of interesting stuff around that you have to look at, but it's kind of like messy
in a sense and there's all this stuff on whiteboards when you look around you.
And Apple's so clean you could eat off the floor, right? It's almost like their stores
and a product there. So, there's a whole lot of signifiers of the difference between those
two companies.
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #10: Hi. Thanks for coming to talk with us. So, the earlier success
of Google as with all other companies is a mix of luck and hard work and brilliance.
But I get the sense that Google's success is due slightly less to luck than to other
companies.
For instance, I'm probably getting the details wrong, but I believe Microsoft almost sold
DOS to IBM and didn't become a company. Whereas you said, a couple different examples today,
Google did things very differently from getting to hire a facilities manager. They tried to
reduce the layers of management.
So do you think there's any truth into that statement that Google's success is less due
to luck and more to planned success?
>>Steven Levy: Well, I mean any great company is a mix I think of luck and those sorts of
skills. I could come back with you on Google and say what if Yahoo or Excite, decided to
say yes to Larry and Sergey when they wanted to sell the search engine to them early on?
Then there would not have been a Google, quite literally.
So they got lucky that their product was too good for the portals to want to adopt. There
was one meeting I talked about where they showed it--
>>Ben Fried: Coogle. Is this the Coogle conversation?
>>Steven Levy: No, it was George Bell of Excite.
>>Ben Fried: Right, right.
>>Steven Levy: They showed it to the head of Excite, who was not an engineer at that
point. They brought in adult supervision at Excite and there's this guy who came from
East Coast media background.
And he took a look at the search engine and was appalled at how good it was. He said,
"I don't want people to come here and leave right away. This is too good. We can't buy
this." And he sent them home.
[laughter]
And it really was only when it became clear that no one was gonna give them a million
dollars for their technology that they said, "Well, we might as well start our own company
then." So that was a pretty lucky thing to happen.
And clearly, it wasn't, Google didn't get to where it is by just luck, but you need
some luck along the way to be a big success.
>>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #11: So, what will be Google's downfall? I mean, I think the
popular conception, at least outside Google, maybe inside Google, is that Social is their
sort of blind spot. But maybe you can give us your opinion on what you think the--.
>>Steven Levy: OK, so the way companies like Google and Microsoft, that dominate in a certain
category. And they don't just go all at once. They sort of fade away when you have a big
successful revenue model, like Microsoft has with Windows and Office, and like Google has
with its Ads.
But the question is are they gonna successfully get past that innovator's dilemma and be able
to dominate in the next paradigm? I mean, Google's done a pretty good job in one paradigm
of moving over to mobile. It was essential that Google have a big mobile presence because
everyone knows at a certain point, maybe it's even now. I'm not sure. I don't think so.
The more searches take place--
>>Ben Fried: On a mobile device rather than desktops.
>>Steven Levy: On a mobile device. Has that happened yet?
>>Ben Fried: I don't know if we've crossed over, but if not, it's coming.
>>Steven Levy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It will be here if it isn't already. So, it's not like
Google has no plausible mobile strategy. We all know it. But the Social thing is now becoming
that kind of thing. I think, and we see mobilization here.
I think down the road, sometime in the next ten years, there’s gonna be something big,
which I don't know what it is. Maybe someone at Google knows what it is. But some other
big paradigm shift. It'll be the next thing, whatever it is. And it'll need a bigger shift
than the shift to mobile, or the shift to Social.
And that's really where--. That's gonna be the test of whether Google is going to be
a company that coasts on its successes and shows good results, but like Microsoft, doesn't
really have that excitement and the stock plateaus and things like that. And I think
one thing, which indicates that Google might have a shot, is that Larry and Sergey, they're
into looking ahead.
They're into thinking ahead. They're looking to the future there. So to me, some people
criticize Google for things like the autonomous cars, but I don't think that's crazy. I think
to me, first of all it's not really un-Googley. These are cars with information processors
that rely in turn, that they gather information. They get information from Google in order
to operate.
It's AI. To me, it's very much in the spirit of other Google stuff. But it's also an interesting
new area. Who knows what could come of that in those cars gathering information about
the world there? So I think that taking these moon shots just might be the way that Google
takes the next big paradigm on.
>>Ben Fried: Thank you. Are we out of time now? Is that--. So, that was a great note
to end the conversation on. Thank you.
>>Steven Levy: Thank you, Ben.
>>Ben Fried: That was upbeat and optimistic and forward-looking.
[laughter] You talked about our great strengths. So,
Steven, thank you so much for coming.
>>Steven Levy: Thank you. I'll be signing books, then?
>>Ben Fried: Yeah. I think we have you--.
>>Steven Levy: I'd be happy to do that, yeah.
>>Ben Fried: signing books.
[applause]