Last summer I took a field trip away from this newsletter’s usual focus on social media and democracy for a three-part series on the sell side of online advertising (1, 2, 3). It was so much fun that I’m making it an annual tradition. This year, I’m going to reflect on my experience of Google’s corporate culture, and what it says about large tech companies in general.
Sing, muse, of a high-performing man
Sridhar Ramaswamy was a legend at Google from 2003 to 2018. A computer science PhD, he made huge contributions to the infrastructure of Search ads, and in early 2014 became SVP of the entire 5,000-person Ads group, plus Commerce (shopping, travel, payments, etc). When he left Google, he started a subscription search engine called Neeva, and now serves as CEO of the cloud data and AI company Snowflake and a trustee of Brown University.
I didn’t know much about Sridhar when he took over the Ads group. I was a leader in the Display side of the business, which was mostly separate from Search ads at that time. My direct manager for a decade, Neal Mohan, was an effective buffer at first, but when he left Ads for YouTube in late 2015, Sridhar’s influence started to be felt on the Display group.
Troy: Display execs just had to conquer that damn city
My troubles began when the post-Neal leaders of the Display group got Sridhar to approve a Big Change to Google’s ad network. I’m not going to explain the technical details, because it would take this entire article and bore half of you to death. What you need to know for my story is two things:
Display leaders had been stubbornly fighting for this Big Change for eight years, like Agamemnon on the beach outside Troy, because it was supposed to dramatically improve advertiser performance and make Google a ton of money.
As an ad network change involving something valuable to Google, it needed online publishers (my area of responsibility) to handle the Big Change responsibly.
The catch was that Sridhar had never been a fan of the Big Change, so the price of finally getting his approval was putting a bunch of strict requirements and restrictions on the publishers who would be part of it. Nobody from the publisher business was in the room when this deal was made, so nobody realized that those conditions doomed the project. If a publisher was already doing well enough to meet the requirements, there was no mathematical way for the Big Change to earn them enough money to be worth agreeing to the restrictions. And any publishers desperate enough to agree to the restrictions did not have businesses healthy enough to meet the requirements.
Charybdis: the whirlpool of Sridhar’s will
The naive solution would be to just explain the problem directly to Sridhar, but that’s not how Google worked. SVPs like him were not mere mortals. The conventional wisdom was that you had to know how to approach them in the right way if you wanted a positive result, as if you were asking the Gods to grant you fair winds. And as I mentioned, I barely knew Sridhar.
So I asked a trusted peer, who had worked directly with Sridhar before, for advice. Because it’s my summer field trip and I want to have some fun with the mythology theme, I’ve recast their response in the form of a fragment of epic poetry. (Sincere apologies to famed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson.)
Naive senior director! Heed my words.
I am a VP, who knows Sridhar well.
Only the weak resist his bold ideas.
His will is fixed upon the goals he sets.
He has prevailed against such doubts before
and sailed great storms to lead his teams to launch.
If you predict a failure from the start
he will not trust your tale, but will believe
that you are seeking to avoid the work,
to dare, to risk, to face your fears and try.
Sridhar expects you to follow his way,
to bring the Change to market in good faith
and only judge the results at the end.
Until that day – fight harder, do your best.
Show Sridhar your commitment to his cause.
Perhaps, if you fail nobly, he will grant
the rightness of your claims, but only if
he can see the results with his own eyes.
tl;dr: keep your mouth quiet and get back to work.
So I did. No meeting with Sridhar. My objections stayed within Display.
Scylla: in which Sridhar bites your head off
Like Odysseus, my team and I wandered lost. We were building something we didn’t believe in and facing publisher resistance at every turn. After months of futility, I hoped that this might finally be the right time to explain the problem to Sridhar. I consulted the Oracle of Sridhar again for wisdom. The omens were, again, most unfavorable.
Ha! Callow product manager, do not
blame Sridhar for your failure to meet goals.
My tale speaks of another team that failed.
Excuses failed to sway Sridhar’s hard heart.
A great Election once came to our shores.
To meet its Target, the election team
Asked for a Risky Thing that could bear profit.
This Risky Thing would help them reach their goal,
but harm might come to people and Google.
Sridhar denied the team their Thing, ruling thus:
‘Do not do this, political ad team,
for I forbid it. Succeed as you are!’
Back at their cubicles, the team endured,
but they struggled without the Risky Thing.
The Election ended in sad ruin.
The team had missed their Target, so they wept,
returning to Sridhar abashed, in tears.
‘Why have you missed your Target?’ he demanded.
‘Because you would not grant the Thing we asked,’
the team replied, heavy in heart and soul.
Sridhar scoffed. ‘This is your fault, I declare.
You should have made a better case back then:
done more to convince me your plan was good
and made me believe that your need was true.’
The team left the conference room ashamed
mourning for their shattered and dead careers
and were heard from no more.
OK, that last part didn’t happen. Nobody got fired over the election ads revenue miss (to my knowledge). But the intended warning of this story to me was clear – if you didn’t make your case well enough up front, don’t come back whining about it later.
So again, no meeting with Sridhar. We sailed on, landing on hostile island after hostile island as hope dwindled.
No Ithaca for me
This debacle was a major contribution to my decision to leave Ads. It wasn’t because of failure. I had endured plenty of that working at a series of doomed dot-com startups early in my career. What killed my enthusiasm for Ads was feeling that there was no way for me to succeed without a direct relationship with Sridhar and no idea of how to cultivate one. The Gods were on distant Olympus, and seemingly looked upon me with disfavor. Add a mournful chorus and you’d have a tidy Greek tragedy: “Bellack Wrecks.”
With the luxury of hindsight, I wish that I had defied the gods, gone to Sridhar with my concerns, and fought harder against committing my team to a long march ending in failure. It would have been better to know where I stood outright than to rely on signs and portents.
[Ironically, Sridhar left Google a few months before I left Ads, but by that point I was checked out and just marking time before I headed off to Jigsaw to fight bad guys.]
The culture of big tech is built on stories like this
I am not sharing this to blame Sridhar, because, to be very clear, this is all hearsay. I have zero direct knowledge of anything Sridhar ever said about any of this. I wasn’t in the room when the Big Change was pitched and approved, and the other two stories came from other Googlers who may or may not have witnessed the events they described.
Hearsay about leaders played a disproportionately large role in setting Google’s culture when I was there because the company never fixed its chaotic, debate-based approach to decision-making as it grew to immense size. When you’re never sure what the decision criteria are going to be, personality trumps process. And when the organization gets so big that you can’t judge the most important personalities directly, stories become the default mode of culture transmission.
The choice of which stories to tell can distort entire organizations, and play on our susceptibility to superstition. Was I being given good advice about Sridhar, or being steered astray due to one person’s biases? When I acted as a de-facto Priest of Neal Mohan with my own team, did I ever cause them to self-censor an important idea that the real Neal would have loved?
This is yet another reason to be suspicious of personality-driven tech companies whose founders wield absolute power. The stories I’ve been told about Mark Zuckerberg are of an absolutely confident overlord who is always willing to overrule his underlings if he disagrees with them. How much is that crippling Meta’s internal culture? When Elon Musk forces Grok to echo his political beliefs, does that trickle down to encouraging a political slant within all of his companies?
We have no way to know, because everything happens behind closed doors. We’re expected to accept this, and trust that these leaders are well-informed and exhibiting good judgement. We might as well be praying to Athena.
As I’ve written before, teaching a generation that they are powerless online primes them to obey authoritarians in real life.
Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].
