Marissa Mayer explains how Google's systems broke as it scaled from tens to thousands of employees. Eric Schmidt slashed hiring plans and created laminated tokens named after Larry and Sergey to ration new hires, which sparked an internal black market where leaders traded for the right to staff up.
Chapters
When Eric Schmidt came, he really, you know, I remember we would always have to be reinventing our processes. Just when, you know, you would sort of feel like, okay, we got it down, we know what the hiring process should be, or we know what the process for promotion should be or deploying code on the site should be, we would go, like, one step further, and then everything would break and we'd have site outages or, you know, people are getting really frustrated. And one of the things that he talked about a lot, which I understand is one of the principles of this class, is that he was like, look at every order of magnitude. You should expect every process to break, and you should expect to completely have to reinvent it. So he's like, it's very different to deal with tens of people versus hundreds of people versus thousands of people managing tens, hundreds, thousands. And each time you cross over one of those barriers, it's very likely that the system that you used very successfully for the previous stage is going to break and you're going to have to rethink how do we do this? How do we train people up to deploy code on the site safely? How do we want to scale our hiring process to make sure we keep our quality bar where it is? But it's also important to recognize one of the things I think that Eric did at first, and it really frustrated us. But when Eric came in around March and we had a plan, we had closed the previous year at about 200 people, and we had a plan to add, to get to 400 people, so basically double the size of the company over the coming year. And Eric showed up in March and he looked at the plan, he just said, there's just no way you guys are going to be able to double the number of employees. Obviously, we were going to more than double traffic, more than double revenue. There's no way you're going to be able to double the number of employees and really keep the quality, the culture, the way that you want the company to be. So I'm going to let the company collectively hire 50 people this year. We basically took our hiring plan and scaled it down by about a factor of four. And it was actually quite funny. He created these little dollar bills with Larry and Sergey's faces on them, and he called them Larry's and Sergey's, and he laminated them. He had his assistant laminate them. And so he had these cards and he said, look for me. And every time you want to hire someone, you have to present a hiring packet and a resume, and you have to hand it in with a Larry and Sergey. And so he took the Larrys and Sergeys and he distributed them out to the different VPs. And then of course, it became like a black market for Larry's and Sergey's, which actually became surprisingly efficient. Yes. Because what would happen is the head of sales would have one and he really would need, in order to make a sale, he would need an engineer to build something for him. So he'd be like, look, I'm going to give you this Larry and Sergey, but you have to promise you're going to use it to hire someone who's going to build this feature, to secure this revenue, et cetera. And so it actually became really interesting. And I think, but as painful as it was, because we were just like, wait, there's just way too much work here to slow down our hiring like this, it was actually a really good moment for the company because it made us be really thoughtful about how we were scaling, where we were putting our resources. We had to be that much more thoughtful about where to prioritize and where the opportunities were. And so, yes, hyper growth is really fun, but you also want to realize when you want that hypergrowth to happen in terms of users and revenue and not necessarily in terms of the size of the size of the company.
