its library. After Page had the university’s consent, he flew to Washington to make a deal with the Library of Congress. Google would soon sign up Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library, among others. They established an internal team under the joint direction of Dan Clancy, who had a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and had worked at NASA, and Adam Smith, a former investment banker who had served as vice president of new media at Random House. Clancy offered another reason to support the effort: to promote reading among young people who did their reading online. “I sampled college students and asked, ‘How many of you went to a library in the last year?”’ Only half raised their hand. “There’s so much information on the Web that students accept secondary sources.” He hoped to combat this. Adam Smith saw their effort “as a book-promoting vehicle,” bringing the work of authors to a wider audience. About 90 percent of the more than twenty million books ever published were out of print, and Sandler and Smith had a goal of digitizing ten thousand books each day.
But in their rush to fulfill this mission, Google did not first pause to extensively consult with American publishers and authors who owned the copyrights to many of these books. “If we had done that,” Brin said, “we might not have done the project.” Because they didn’t do that, Google would later have a lawsuit to contend with.
THE FOUNDERS USUALLY FOCUS on different things. Page devotes more time to how consumers interact with Google, hence his chosen title, president of products. Brin spends more time on technology, hence his title, president of technology. The titles can be misleading, because “we overlap a lot,” said Brin. It’s also inexact because each founder has unpredictable interests or quirks. Brin, for example, thrusts himself into the middle of strategy sessions for many business negotiations, which is welcomed by his fellow executives. He is also a principal proponent, according to vice president of people operations Laszlo Bock, of Google’s massage programs and child care centers, while Page is more assertive about which engineers to hire, the food served, and the size of cafeterias. Within Google, this sometimes creates confusion. For example, Bill Campbell, who is in many of the key meetings, said he believes Brin is most focused “on the end user experience” and that Page is more focused on “the product development process to get there.” On the other hand, employee number 1, Craig Silverstein, thinks Brin “brings more of an operational focus.”
“We’re pretty lucky because we have both of us plus Eric,” said Brin. “We are able to choose the things to focus on. It’s a great luxury.” Because “I can’t escape being a bit of a tech nerd,” Brin said, he spends a lot of time on technology. But so does Page. “These things are subtle. We overlap a lot.”
What both bring, said Nick Fox, the group business manager, ads quality, is “an ability to push you down paths you wouldn’t have thought about before.” When Fox first joined Google and watched Page and Brin at TGIF, “I thought they must be two guys who had a great idea and got lucky.” But he quickly concluded they always had “great insights,” and an ability to provoke thought. He offers this example: They were in a meeting discussing new ways to advertise with search and how to move beyond the text ads Google relied upon. Brin was holding a plastic bottle of water, and said, “Let’s turn this bottle upside down. If I’m a butcher and I’m trying to get customers into my store, maybe a text ad is not an effective way to get customers into my store. But maybe if I was able to film a video of myself showing all the fresh food and great prices and I’m just talking about my store with a lot of passion, maybe this is the way I can get people to come into my store.” It was not the typical auto dealer ad announcing a President’s Day sale, Fox said. “You don’t think about ads of people talking passionately about their store.” For various reasons, such ads are still not part of search, but to Fox that is less important than the ability of the founders to “turn the way people think about something upside down.”
Alissa Lee encountered this upside-down approach. In the first five years of Google’s life, one or both founders insisted on interviewing each