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法奶日報發行人盧立人拜啓2013.09. 25. 台北.

Chapter 10

Microsoft, Google and Me

I used to be a quiet scientist. Never did I imagine myself in the spotlight for what some media called “lawsuit of the century” until it happened overnight.

“What is it about this Kai-Fu Lee? Why are Microsoft and Google fighting over him?” People curiously asked such questions in the summer of 2005, the most difficult summer of my life. Microsoft sued me. Media followed me. Rumors haunted me. It was all overwhelming, and all of it was because of a supposedly simple job change.

“We Should Circle Him Like Wolves.”

I started thinking about leaving Microsoft in March 2005. I wanted to work in China again, but there were no suitable opportunities at Microsoft’s China branches. I was keen on being a part of the phenomenal growth in China. I was writing a book titled Be Your Personal Best in Chinese for China’s Generation Y. In the meantime I was looking for a job opportunity that would bring me back to China.

Given my familiarity with American corporate culture, my understanding of the Chinese market and government relations, plus my experience working for Microsoft Research China, I believed I would be an ideal candidate for an executive’s position in the China branch of an international company. I would bridge the gap of communication between the two cultures.

But I would not work for just any company. Microsoft was a great company. I wanted to find a company even better than Microsoft, a company from which I could learn a lot.  With that thought, Google was the first to come to my mind.

Unlike the long established Microsoft, young Google appeared to operate with tremendous energy. Google in 2005 also seemed enigmatic. Their products were insanely great. But the greatest mystery was: how did such a young company create so many great products so quickly with so few engineers?

I read The Google Story, the Google-authorized best seller by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed. I particularly liked the episode about how Google co-founder Sergey Brin decided to keep the company’s homepage simple:

Lacking the funds to hire a designer and the artistic talent to create something elegant, Brin kept the Google homepage simple. From the start, Google’s clean, pristine look attracted computer users hunting for information. In a cluttered world, its primary colors and white background conveyed purity, with universal appeal.

Everyone knew Google had an outstanding search engine and a working environment as much fun as Disneyland. Those who had visited the Google office building would tell outrageous stories:

“Hey! Did you know a Googler can sit on an exercise ball to write programs?”

“Can you believe they come skateboarding into the office?”

More surprisingly, Google even hired Charlie Ayers, former chef for the Grateful Dead, to cook free meals for employees. Everyone in Silicon Valley wondered how a company could spoil employees so much and be so successful. It sounded incredible and incredibly cool!

Back then, no one but Googlers knew what led to Google’s success. Google was very open to every employee but secretive to outsiders. They didn’t even want to go public because that would require them to publicize their financial statements, which would reveal how much income their search engine was able to generate, and tip off competitors (like Microsoft). 

If a computer engineer left a job for Google during that time, former colleagues would say this person disappeared like being kidnapped by aliens. They never heard from him/her about his/her work at Google. It was a miracle that Google, with over 2,000 people, managed to prevent anyone from leaking any of the company’s business secrets.

Google also created a Silicon Valley legend with 1,000-fold return to its VC investors. Silicon Valley’s VC returns are above stock market only because of Google; if Google returns are removed, then the VC returns are no better than the stock market.

Many were surprised to find out the legend was created by two graduate students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The Google Story describes how the two founders of Google met at Stanford University as follows:

When Larry met Sergey in the spring of 1995, they connected instantly. Despite their differences, there was no denying the chemistry between them; the energy was palpable. It was during a new student orientation at Stanford, and Sergey was showing Larry and other prospective graduate students around the sun-laden California campus and its environs. Suddenly, the pair started to argue about random issues. It seemed an odd moment for two people who barely knew each other to be debating, sparks flying, but in fact each was playing a favorite game.

In 1997, Stanford faculty, staff and students began to use the search engine created by the pair at the web address google.stanford.edu. Through word of mouth, their search engine quickly became popular. The size of the database and the number of users soon exceeded the capacities of their computers. But they were unable to afford new computers, so they looked for old computers no one wanted in warehouses and bought parts to try putting together devices. They once considered selling their patent.

Fortunately, they met an angel investor. Google also seized the timing of dot com bust by hiring many brilliant engineers from companies that got in trouble.  For example, Alan Eustace (who would become my boss) and Jeff Dean (who invented the key back-end infrastructure at Google) both came from the now-defunct Digital Western Research Laboratory. Also, Google became such a legend that many creative engineers accepted pay cuts to join the company for its potential.

Google became more and more famous in Silicon Valley. Those who were able to get  job interviews with Google would be labeled as “smart people.”  Computer engineers who never got a call from Google recruiters were embarrassed to admit it. That made Google jobs all the more desirable.

Microsoft employees were using Google products and talking about Google like everyone else. Some were skeptical, wondering how much money a search engine could make, saying “the kids in Disneyland” would eventually grow up and see the tough reality of the real world.

However, hundreds of Microsoft employees left for Google every year.

I had friends who became happier after joining Google. They looked more energetic than ever, and they said to me, “Kai-Fu, come to Google. It’s fun!”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes!” they replied with excitement. “I feel 20 years younger!”

I was impressed by how much they seemed to enjoy their work. Even more impressive was Google’s so-called “free and transparent” culture. Employees chose what they wanted to do and formed teams based on their own interests. They all focused on how to make the company better and the products more useful. There were no secrets, no hidden agenda, no politics, no bureaucracy.

There was a well known story about Google’s egalitarian working environment: a new Googler was unable to find an empty desk until he saw one in the CEO Eric Schmidt’s office. He moved right in there. Schmidt was reluctant and made a suggestion in a timid voice, “Would you please ask around to see if there are other options?” The employee followed the suggestion but came back to say, “I asked everybody. They all said I should just stay here.” Then the employee shared Schmidt’s office for the next six months, during which Google was in the process of going public. Every time Schmidt received a phone call with confidential information, he had to find another place to talk. This continued until Google moved to a new compound. Schmidt purposefully picked an extremely small office so he could finally get privacy.

Such a story probably wouldn’t happen anywhere else.

Most astonishing of all was Google’s unique IPO process.  Unlike other IPOs which favored larger investors, Google insisted on an auction-based IPO that treated small and large investors alike, providing everyone direct access to its shares. This offended numerous investment banks but won applause from the general public. Google put the user’s satisfaction before profit. Most of its software and services were free. It would continue making products that were not necessarily profitable as long as they were useful. This was so rare in a profit-driven business world that it made me deeply admire the company.

But I didn’t expect this admirable company to create a position that happened to match my goals. To an observer from the outside, Google appeared not all that interested in the China market, with no office in China and only a few engineers in the US working on its Chinese products.

One day in May 2005, as I was browsing news on sina.com, the most popular Chinese language website, a headline jumped into my sight, “Google Will Make it Big in China!” Then I learned from the news article that Google had purchased google.cn as the domain name of its future China branch, and was in the process of building a big “China plan”.

Going back to China, joining a very cool company, doing groundbreaking work…Wasn’t this job opportunity in front of me exactly what I was dreaming of and looking for? I believed in reaching out to grasp opportunities when seeing them, so I didn’t wait. I reached out by looking up Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s email address on line and writing to him about my interest in Google China. I was following my heart.

Google responded swiftly and efficiently. Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president of Engineering and Research, reached me by phone that night. He sounded as warm as spring weather.

“Kai-Fu, I’m really surprised that you’re interested in us,” he said. “We’re ecstatic about your email. Actually, we’ve been studying your background. We know you’ve worked in China and created a miracle for Microsoft Research Asia. You’ve worked in R & D for great companies. We’ve already had an internal discussion about you. You know what our senior vice president of Product Management, Jonathan Rosenberg, said about you? He said, ‘We should circle him like wolves. He’s a superstar!’”

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【法奶日報www.lulijen.com–2014.2.12.刊出，第9-1081】