importance of open debate in the care and feeding of innovative people. “In
our experience, most smart creatives have strong opinions and are itching to
spout off; for them, the cultural obligation to dissent gives them the freedom to
do just that,” they wrote. They stressed the importance of rooting out “knaves”
(liars, cheaters, loafers) but supporting and protecting “divas,” difficult but bril-
liant employees who can grate on other employees’ nerves. “You need these
aberrant geniuses because they’re the ones that drive, in most cases, the prod-
uct excellence,” Schmidt said in an interview with wired earlier this year. “They
are better than other technical people.”
One of Google’s paradigmatic divas was Andy Rubin, the cofounder of
Android, a startup that Google acquired in 2005 for an estimated $50 million.
Rubin was known for being territorial, demanding, and impressively inventive.
Journalists rarely failed to mention his penchant for oddball devices, including
a doorbell at his home with a robotic arm that rang a gong on the interior, and a
retinal scanner on the exterior. (“The system makes it easier to deal with former
girlfriends,” reported a 2007 New York Times profile, paraphrasing Rubin. “No
messy scenes retrieving keys—it’s just a simple database update.”)
As executives saw it, Rubin delivered handsomely for Google. More than any-
one else, he ensured the company’s safe and profitable transition into the mobile
era. As users moved from desktops to smartphones, Android’s open source oper-
ating system acted as a Trojan horse for Google’s consumer apps, most impor-
tantly search. By 2013, Android had a billion users, and its success afforded Rubin
unbelievable perks, including a $14 million loan with a 1 percent interest rate
to buy a beach house in Japan. Page was particularly grateful. At one point he
awarded Rubin a $150 million stock grant, before Google’s compensation com-
mittee even approved the offer.
Google didn’t invent all the concepts that charged its culture. (“Obligation to dis-
sent,” for example, is borrowed from the management consulting firm McKinsey.)
But it tied them together into a coherent, aspirational narrative about engineers
as a free-thinking people uniquely capable of reconfiguring the world from first
principles. This culture helped recruiting, it helped retention, and it kept the public
and regulators rapt with admiration. So what if Google was becoming inordinately
powerful? The monopolies of the past engaged in price-gouging and became less
inventive. Google’s products stayed free and continued to blow your mind.
Occasionally, of course, a glitch would mar Google’s image as a benign, gravity-
defying force in world markets, but even those glitches would sometimes resolve
in ways that reinforced the myth. In 2006, eager to tap into a growing market,
Google opened an office in Beijing and launched a censored version of its search
engine in China. Employees saw this as a clear violation of Google’s principles;
they were supposed to make the world’s information universally accessible, not
suppress it. The project quickly went awry. Executives had hoped that Google’s
presence in China would make the country
more open, not closed. Instead, it embold-
ened the government to demand more con-
cessions. Then, in December 2009, Google
discovered a sophisticated cyberattack, orig-
inating inside China, designed to access the
Gmail accounts of dissidents and human
rights activists. Brin, who had been extremely
reluctant to enter China all along, convinced
Page that they should stop complying with
China’s censorship rules and tell the public
about the attack.
At the time, Google was run as a trium-
virate, with CEO Eric Schmidt playing the
role of resident grown-up. Schmidt argued
that if Google stopped censoring search
results, it would never get back into China.
But Page and Brin were unmoved. In January
2010, employees at Google’s office in Beijing
learned from a public blog post that the com-
pany was pulling back from China. In an
emotional teleconference, they told execu-
tives they felt abandoned.
The reaction in Mountain View, however,
was euphoric. At the TGIF meeting that week,
employees burst into thunderous applause
and gave Brin a standing ovation. “The leg-
acy of the China decision was a giant dose of
goodwill from Googlers around the world,”
Schmidt wrote in How Google Works; it reaf-
firmed the company’s principles “governing
how all tough decisions should be made.”
Within five years, however, the costs of
that decision—and the limits of Google’s
entire formula for success—were starting
to become uncomfortably clear. Google
was still minting money, but ad revenue
growth was slowing, and the cost of hiring
engineers and funding R&D was climbing
fast. Investors wanted to know what was
next, and Google didn’t have a convincing
answer. The company was making incred-
ible strides in artificial intelligence, but its
growth online was increasingly boxed in
by social networking sites. For users hang-
ing out inside Facebook or talking to Alexa,
Google’s apps were no longer a click away.
And while the company’s founders tinkered
with self-driving cars and helium balloons
that beamed the internet down to earth,
Amazon had built up a huge advantage in
an area that should have been Google’s to
lose: cloud computing.
Page and Brin had been focused on the
cloud for more than a decade. They had
built a sublime constellation of data centersGoogle’s culture helpedrecruiting, it helpedretention, and it kept thepublic and regulatorsrapt with admiration.