By Douglas Edwards
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 416 pages, $32
Reviewed by Mike Stimpson
Doug Edwards took a big gamble in 1999 when he left an established newspaper for an Internet startup with a funny name.
Jumping from a California daily newspaper's marketing department to the fledgling Google entailed a $25,000 cut in salary.
But thanks to generous stock options, Edwards was a millionaire when he left Google less than six years later.
Good for him. Now, why should you be interested in his memoir?
Well, for starters, I'm Feeling Lucky offers the first book-length insider account of Google's formative years.
Judging by the book's depth of detail, Edwards clearly was paying close attention and taking plenty of notes as the little search-engine site grew to the Internet giant it is today.
He was in on Google's tense negotiations with AOL for a momentous advertising and search contract, and saw that partnership evaporate when AOL bought a rival search company.
He saw news hosting after the Sept. 11 terror attacks evolve into Google News.
He was around for the birth of Gmail, and he watched as the company's first attempt at a social network site flopped (it recently launched another attempt, dubbed Google+).
Edwards was Google's brand manager, meaning he was tasked with guiding and shaping its public image as it grew in popularity and breadth of services.
The job included being the company's master wordsmith, writing things to build on public perceptions of Google as smart, honourable and a bit whimsical.
So it's no surprise that this, his first book, is highly readable, brimming with clever analogies and metaphors, and chock-full of nimbly told anecdotes.
Many of the stories have to do with Google's founders, Stanford University alumni Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The book portrays Page and Brin as brilliant, eccentric and riddled with contradictions.
They founded the company without a clear idea of how it would eventually make money, reckoning they would find a way to make the business profitable without compromising their ideals too much.
It seems the venture capitalists that bankrolled Google in its early years did so on faith that the founding geniuses would make the search engine work as a business.
Brin and Page often said it was important to be honest with Google's users, but at other times they adamantly refused to disclose how some things the company did might imperil privacy.
They expected long hours from employees and were ruthlessly stingy toward suppliers, yet the workplace included an on-site chef, massage services, a sauna and gym, a wide assortment of candy, air hockey and video games before there was even a hint of profit.
Partly in lieu of bigger salaries, Page and Brin offered employees stock options that made millionaires of many when the company went public on Wall Street in 2004.
Edwards doesn't disclose how much he pocketed from selling his shares, but there are clues that it was a rather substantial sum.
He does say that he borrowed money from his parents to purchase a large number of shares -- he was surprised at how many he was allowed to buy -- at 20 cents each shortly after joining the company.
Since the share price soared past $100 right after the initial public offering's launch in late August 2004, we can surmise that the lucky wordsmith made off with a staggering amount.
This book certainly is well-written, though it would be better without so many distracting footnotes.
Every few pages, there's another footnote or two to draw the reader away from the story at hand.
Often the footnote contains information that we could do without; other times, it should have been a brief parenthetical remark in the story.
Oh well. Like Google itself, this Google memoir strives to be thorough but falls a bit short of perfection.
