BUILDING A BRAND: Google's ruling trio— Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page— looks to Legos for some inspiration
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Unlike many competitors in Silicon Valley, Google tends to let engineers run the show. The company is almost allergic to marketing. (Name another $100 billion company that doesn't run TV ads.) Innovation tends to bubble up from those bright young minds. The challenge is keeping them all happy. The free food and laundry and the heavily subsidized massages and haircuts all help, but there also has to be enough creative work to go around. Google came up with a formula to help ensure this. Every employee is meant to divide his or her time in three parts: 70% devoted to Google's core businesses, search and advertising; 20% on pursuits related to the core; and 10% on far-out ideas. The San Francisco wi-fi initiative resulted from someone's 10% time; so did Google Talk, a free system for instant and voice messaging. If Google ever builds that space elevator, it will no doubt be during 10% time.
It may sound like a random split, but Brin, who got his undergraduate degree in mathematics, insists, without much elaboration, that 70-20-10 is scientifically based. One learns not to question his ability to make calculations. At one stage, I ask him to figure out how tall the 8 billion Web pages that Google once said it indexes would be if they were stacked pieces of paper. He quickly comes up with an answer, then keeps crunching numbers in his head as we discuss other issues. Finally, after recalculating his estimate for paper width, he blurts out: "500 miles." I ask Brin whether, as a kid, he used to play with numbers, adding digits, say, in the phone book. "No," he says. "That would be crazy."
To manage all those engineers and their ideas, Google needs gatekeepers. The workhorse is Mayer, 30, a superfast-talking, blond, blue-eyed force of nature who in high school starred on both the debate and the pom-pom teams. Mayer joined Google in 1999 as employee No. 20 and the first female engineer and now manages innovation in the search field. Several times a week, she holds university-style office hours, during which her charges come by with questions about projects in development. Mayer greets them at her desk, which is cluttered with solar-powered bobble heads and other Japanese toys. Depending on the problem, she may serve as editor, designer, coder or friend. At a session a few weeks ago, a procession of earnest young men and women arrived to discuss projects they hoped would win her approval and, eventually, Brin's and Page's. Some were whimsical. (A designer was creating an interface so that Google users searching Christmas would see a candy-cane border around the results.) Others were all business. (A female engineer took in test results that showed ad revenue could increase by tens of millions of dollars if Google simply enlarged the type size for certain sponsored links. Brin and Page will hear that one.) Other proposals were clearly sinking when Mayer invoked her mother, as in, "I'm just not sure my mom would understand this."