Brotopia Page 8

  “When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won,” Thiel proclaimed from the RNC podium. Then, in a punch line referring to the recent controversy over transgender rights, he continued, “Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”

  In thousands of public posts and industry blogs, Thiel was vilified. When there were public calls for him to be taken off the board at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg himself came to Thiel’s defense. “We care deeply about diversity,” Zuckerberg posted on Facebook. “That’s easy to say when it means standing up for ideas you agree with. It’s a lot harder when it means standing up for the rights of people with different viewpoints to say what they care about. That’s even more important. We can’t create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate.”

  It’s ironic that Zuckerberg would defend Thiel, the author of The Diversity Myth, on the grounds of “diversity.” Speaking to college students via a Facebook feed, Zuckerberg went as far as to offer up Thiel as an example of how the company creates a diverse, inclusive environment. “I think you need to have all kinds of diversity if you want to make progress together as a society,” Zuckerberg said. Amen to that. But billionaire Trump supporters aren’t the only ones who need a diversity champion.

  When Trump won the election, to the shock and horror of liberal Americans, that is, most of Silicon Valley, Thiel became the main bridge between the technology industry and a president who was a Twitter fanatic yet declared he sends emails “almost never” and was skeptical of the “whole, you know, age of computer.” Most of the tech elite despised Thiel for his role in electing Trump. Yet his contrarian bet on an unlikely political candidate now gave Thiel more power than ever, even among the people who say they hated him.

  Not long after the polls closed, Thiel brokered a meeting between the president-elect and tech leaders, including Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, all of whom had openly supported Hillary Clinton. These tech lords had little choice but to pay fealty (to Trump, and Thiel). Now the contrarian “misfit,” who once called the value of diversity a myth, was whispering into the ear of the man holding the most powerful office in the world.

  3

  GOOGLE: WHEN GOOD INTENTIONS AREN’T ENOUGH

  IN 1998, WHEN TWO quirky and very academic Stanford students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to start a search engine business, they needed an office. Like many great tech entrepreneurs before them, they looked around for an underutilized Silicon Valley garage. Through mutual friends, they found a landlord in Susan Wojcicki, who wasn’t just any Menlo Park homeowner. An up-and-coming businesswoman, Wojcicki, then thirty years old, had worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company and then in marketing at Intel. She had also recently finished her MBA at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, and she displayed her business acumen in the rent she charged for the garage: $1,700 a month, which was above the going rate. She also made sure to get a security deposit. When they weren’t working, she says she would often find them in the hot tub.

  “I wish I could say I had a great eye and I picked them out as students, out of all the students at Stanford,” Wojcicki told me in a Bloomberg Television interview. “But it didn’t work that way. What happened was I bought a house, and houses are really expensive in Silicon Valley. And I was a student, and so, I wanted someone to help me pay the mortgage.”

  Over the next year, when Wojcicki came home from Intel, she would sometimes order pizza with Page and Brin and listen to them talk excitedly about their nascent technology. She could see that their search engine algorithm had tremendous potential, even though the two founders had only one employee at the time. Her instinct proved right: a year later, the garage was overflowing with desks and computers, and Google had grown to over a dozen employees. Wojcicki decided it was time to quit Intel and become Google’s first marketing manager.

  By any Silicon Valley standards, she was an unusual early hire. She wasn’t a computer scientist or an engineer. Her background was in business. She was a woman. And she was married and pregnant with her first child.

  “I don’t think any of them even had a girlfriend, let alone thinking about having a baby,” Wojcicki recalled. “But, you know, I told them up front that I was pregnant, and it took them a minute to kind of register that. Then actually they thought about it, and they were like, ‘You know what? We’re going to build you a day care.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, you only have sixteen employees. You’re just getting started. You don’t have any revenue models.’” Wojcicki laughed as she retold the story. “I said, ‘It’s okay. I’m glad you’re really supportive.’”

  Google became, in a little more than a decade, one of the most respected, innovative, and powerful brands on the planet. Its astonishing success compels attention, as does its track record with women—both the good and the bad. Google, in many ways, has gone to great lengths to engage with women. And it’s worth examining how the company has benefited from early efforts at gender diversity but more recently has become the subject of both government and employee lawsuits claiming the company treats women unfairly. This is a story about how good intentions can ultimately be defeated.

  Google’s staff has always been male dominated. In the beginning, however, Page and Brin put effort into hiring a diverse team and gave real power to a number of notably strong, smart women. The co-founders embodied the epitome of what venture capitalists and later public shareholders believed made the greatest tech entrepreneurs: they were “all nerd” with big visions, yet their interest in hiring women, explicitly, set them apart from the tech bros and PayPal Mafia. Whether Google would have achieved the same level of success without hiring these key early women is impossible to know. But what is clear is that several women executives were critical, in those early days, to creating that rarest of technological start-ups: one that turned an actual profit within just a few years.

  THE WOMEN WHO BUILT GOOGLE

  In person, Susan Wojcicki bears little resemblance to the many brash and often self-promoting entrepreneurs whom I’ve interviewed over the years. She exudes a quiet, steady confidence. She does not seek the spotlight; it was only in 2016, nearly three years into her current tenure as CEO of YouTube, the video-streaming site owned by Google, that she finally agreed to my repeated requests for a television interview. When I asked probing questions about YouTube’s business, she was careful not to reveal any news-making information that could jolt Google’s stock price or get Wall Street talking. Analysts estimate that if YouTube were a stand-alone business, it could be worth as much as $90 billion—which, by the numbers, makes Wojcicki one of the most powerful female CEOs in Silicon Valley.

  In stories that have been retold about Wojcicki’s fortuitous connection with Page and Brin, she is often portrayed as the lucky one, as if Google were always destined for greatness. At the time she joined the company, however, that was far from a sure thing. Dozens of search engines were already vying for the quickly growing number of internet users, and many more competitors were in the offing. To rise above the competition, Page and Brin had to get their product into the hands of consumers, and for that they needed a marketer, not a coder. Marketing was the very skill that Wojcicki brought to the team during the critical early years when Google transitioned from beta to version 1.0. A more accurate story is that in meeting Wojcicki, Page and Brin were lucky too.

  Wojcicki was convinced that Google’s search algorithms were game changers, but she knew superior code wouldn’t matter if nobody ever used it. Google had no marketing budget, so Wojcicki turned to universities, offering them the opportunity to embed the Google search bar free of charge, and the word spread. She was key in launching the first Google Doodle, the now-famous logo designs displayed
on the home page for holidays and special occasions. She also gave up her $1,700 in rent and moved the space-starved business out of her garage and into a real office. But her most critical contribution was to help lead Google to develop what may be the best business model in the history of Silicon Valley.

  Wojcicki helped pioneer both AdWords and AdSense, two critical revenue streams that bring in tens of billions of dollars for Google today. AdWords allowed advertisers to place ads directly on the search results page, and AdSense enabled website owners to display Google ads that matched their content. Through AdSense, Wojcicki and the team at Google saw the chance to make all content on the web a potential advertising platform for the company. The potential was earth-shattering. “You do the content and leave the selling of the ads to Google,” she told Steven Levy in 2003, when he was a reporter at Newsweek. She predicted that the new technology would “change the economics of the web.”

  That proved to be an enormous understatement. Google’s new advertising platforms not only changed the economics of the web but also disrupted the economics of the magazine, newspaper, and television industries, and advertising itself.

  • • •

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME that Wojcicki rented her garage to Page and Brin, Marissa Mayer was graduating from Stanford. Though her focus was symbolic systems, an interdisciplinary major heavy on computer science, she’d made it through her undergraduate years without ever realizing that she stood out among her almost universally male classmates. On November 9, 1998, that changed.

  On that day, Mayer opened the Stanford Daily newspaper to read her favorite columnist, a student named Rachel Hutton, whose “super-witty” musings reminded Mayer of Carrie Bradshaw’s on HBO’s Sex and the City. In this particular column, Hutton dubbed a few dozen of her schoolmates “campus celebrities,” writing, “I don’t want to connote freaks or weirdos, but just people who seem to draw attention. They’re striking.” Unfortunately, at least one of the people she drew attention to ended up feeling like a weirdo as a result.

  Mayer recognized a few of the “celebrities”—which included the “mean guy at the post office” and the “girls who created their outfits with a Goodwill bin and a couple of staple guns”—but hadn’t crossed paths with some of the others. “I was reading through it like, ‘Oh I don’t know that one, and I don’t know that one,’” when all of a sudden, she says, one of the examples was “the blond woman in the upper-division computer science classes.” Mayer was perplexed. “I was like, ‘I should know this one! I’m in those classes!’”

  Then she realized Rachel Hutton was talking about her. “I know it sounds really funny, but I was like, literally, ‘Am I really the only blond woman in the upper-division computer science courses?’ Until that moment, it was almost like eating the apple in the Garden of Eden or like the emperor’s new clothes, and I was just unaware that I was by myself.”

  The original article is now almost impossible to find. But when I tracked it down, with the help of an early Stanford Daily columnist, I found that it refers not to a blonde but rather to an “outstandingly attractive woman in the upper-division computer science classes.” Classmates at the time agree that the “celebrity” in question was most definitely Mayer.

  After reading that line, Mayer says she suddenly felt very alone: “I started thinking about how many classes am I in a week where I am the only woman or the only blonde or both, and I started paying more attention to it.” She also felt extremely grateful to her parents and the many math and science teachers (whose names she can still rattle off) who never once made her feel out of place.

  Mayer believes that if even one person had told her how much she stuck out, she might never have ended up on the computer programming track. “All it would have taken was one of those people to say, ‘That’s unusual for a girl’ or ‘Not many girls do.’ Sometimes giving a voice to the shortage or giving a voice to the fact that most people drop out,” Mayer says, “almost gives you as a girl the license to, but I was just lucky.” Research backs this up: When minorities are forced to self-identify as minorities, their performance suffers. Sociologists even have a name for this: stereotype threat.

  Page and Brin met Mayer as she was finishing up at Stanford and starting a job search. By this point, she was keenly aware of being the odd duck at school and wasn’t eager to repeat the experience in the work world. “I went to this one start-up that was eighty people,” she told me. She recalls them saying, “‘We really want you. You’ll be our first woman engineer.’ I would have been their fiftieth engineer but their first woman . . . The feeling of walking in the office, the way people looked at me, I knew that it wasn’t going to be a good environment for me.”

  Mayer almost canceled her interview with Google because she had more than a dozen other offers already, then decided, on a whim, to go ahead. From Page and Brin she heard the same refrain. “They were like, ‘You’d be our first woman engineer!’” she says. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’ve already weighed this option, and I’m not excited about it.’” But the company then had so few employees—only eight when she interviewed—that she kept an open mind.

  Meanwhile, Google was putting her through its famously long, drawn-out, no-stone-unturned interview process. “They grilled me for thirteen hours over two or three sessions, then said, ‘We really want you and we think it’s incredibly important to have women here. We want to get a strong group of women in here early,’” Mayer recalls. “They were very sincere about it, and I will tell you it’s very different to join a company where you’re one woman of eight versus one of fifty.” Google was growing so fast that from the time she was hired to the time she started, the company had already added nearly a dozen more employees, so Mayer became the twenty-first. By then there were six women on the staff including an executive assistant.

  One of her first jobs was to help bring AdWords to life, by building the algorithms that would match early Google ads to the search queries users typed in. She also worked on coding the front end, becoming the “gatekeeper” of the minimalist user interface—the single search bar—that was so crucial to Google’s consumer appeal. In this, she worked closely with Wojcicki, with whom she shared a design aesthetic. Together, these two women were inarguably key to making Google a standout tech unicorn. The search engine turned profitable in 2001, just three years after its founding. By 2004, the year after AdSense was launched, profit had multiplied fifty-seven times to almost $400 million, on $3.2 billion in revenue.

  • • •

  GOOGLE’S SUCCESS WAS A team effort, but three of the most valuable players were women. With the help of Wojcicki and Mayer’s leadership, Google had innovated not just best-in-class technology but an unassailable business model. Now the company just needed to scale it. That job would be given to Sheryl Sandberg. Like Wojcicki, Sandberg didn’t have a computer science background. A standout at Harvard, where she majored in economics, Sandberg worked at the World Bank and McKinsey & Company and served as the chief of staff to the U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers. She came to Google in 2001 as vice president of global online sales and operations, and in that role she worked closely with Wojcicki and Mayer on the projects that exploded Google’s profitability.

  Sandberg’s first assignment was to manage the “business unit,” which at the time did not exist, so she built it. She went on to create and manage a massive sales team for both AdSense and AdWords that would serve Google customers around the world. This was happening on the heels of the dot-com bust, when investors were still wary of flashy tech start-ups that could show viral growth in users but not much profit. But in Google, they saw something very different. When the company went public in 2004, it easily raised $1.67 billion, giving it a market capitalization north of $23 billion. The search engine’s price-to-earnings ratio was relatively high. So its investors were still speculating. But the fact that the company was already more than doubling its income year over
year undoubtedly gave Wall Street confidence.

  HOW WOMEN LEADERS INFLUENCED GOOGLE CULTURE

  With Wojcicki, Mayer, and Sandberg as critical leaders at Google, the company was an unusual start-up. It is also clear that these women had a meaningful impact on the corporate culture as other women came on board. The same year the company went public, Google hired a Harvard MBA named Kim Scott as a director. Scott’s memories of her first years there are remarkable, as Silicon Valley stories go. “All of a sudden my bosses were Sheryl Sandberg and Susan Wojcicki,” Scott told me. “I was like, wow, you can really have a vibrant career as a woman and be a great mom too.” In Wojcicki and Sandberg, Scott saw two strong, ambitious, and strategic female role models who were willing to take the time to mentor her. As bosses, these women weren’t any less demanding of excellence than the top-ranking men, but they did have different styles of management and different ways of achieving that excellence.

  From the beginning, Google’s culture has always been intellectually intense. Many of the engineers had PhDs, so there existed a quasi-academic, pick-it-apart-and-find-the-flaws atmosphere. There were some yellers, a fair number of combative people, a lot more speaking over each other than listening. As one former executive put it, “There was a lot of IQ and a lot less EQ.” It was an atmosphere where, if you didn’t have a great deal of confidence in what you were about to say, or weren’t in the mood to argue, you might think twice about opening your mouth.