Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to a wheelbarrow. No academic analysis or bystander's account can capture it. Now Douglas Edwards, "Employee Number 59", takes readers inside the Googleplex for the closest look you can get without an ID card, giving readers a chance to fully experience the potent mix of camaraderie and competition that makes up the company that changed the world. Edwards, Google's first director of marketing and brand management, describes it as it happened. From the first, pioneering steps of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's young, idiosyncratic partners to the evolution of the company's famously nonhierarchical structure (where every employee finds a problem to tackle or a feature to create and works independently), through the physical endurance feats of the company's engineers (both on and off the roller-hockey field) to its ethos to always hire someone smarter than yourself, "I'm Feeling Lucky" captures for the first time the unique, self-invented, culture of the world's most transformative corporation. Welcome to the "Google Experience".

About the Author

Douglas Edwards was director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google from 1999 to 2005 and was responsible for setting the tone and direction of the company's communications with its users.

Reviews

An affectionate, compulsively readable recounting of the early years (1999-2005) of Google from Edwards, its first marketing executive. Accustomed to a traditional corporate environment, Edwards found himself over his head when he came on board at Google, stymied by the hierarchy-free flat company that boasted about 50 employees (working at desks consisting of large wooden doors mounted on metal sawhorses) whose engine was doing 11 million searches a day, barely a blip against Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. The author describes the meteoric rise of a company where all assumptions were challenged, where every problem was viewed as solvable and skirmishes sprang from convictions, not ego, and where an idiosyncratic corporate culture (in-house massages and doctors, bacchanalian parties) reigned from its earliest days. The book's real strength is its evenhandedness; though the author notes the weaknesses of Google 1.0, the occasional mishandling of its own relationships with openness and disclosure, and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin's overweening confidence in their convictions-he also speaks with great warmth and respect about the evolution of a legendary company. This lively, thoughtful business memoir is more entertaining than it really has any right to be, and should be required reading for startup aficionados. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Business books about Google are proliferating as fast as the company's famed rate of innovation, but few have approached the subject from its employees' point of view. As the (approximately) 59th employee hired by Google, Edwards provides an inside look at the company's start-up days. He began in 1999 as Google's "online brand manager" and eventually became its first director of marketing and brand management (he left in 2005), yet much of his tale focuses on his confusion about his role and responsibilities. During his time there, he learned the Google way and the way of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin: "don't talk, do"; rely on data for all decision-making; focus on search quality while spending as little money as possible on everything from hardware to marketing; and don't be evil. Edwards credibly describes both the technical (function over form) and the organizational (nonhierarchical) aspects of his unique workplace, but his story could have profited from tighter editing and an emphasis on reflection over repetition. Verdict Although sure to get word-of-mouth publicity owing to its "inside scoop" nature, this is not a particularly satisfying or fast-paced tell-all on either the technical or interpersonal aspects of Google. Buy for demand only. [See Prepub Alert, 12/10/10.]-Sarah Statz Cords, The Reader's Advisor Online (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.