Executive Reading: The Google Story

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By David Vise and Mark Malseed
Delacorte Press ISBN 055380457X
By Margaret Teichert and Oleg Kaganovich

Here’s a book that opens with the line, “Not since Gutenberg invented the modern printing press more than 500 years ago ... has any invention empowered individuals and transformed access to information as profoundly as Google.” This sounds ridiculous, until you realize it’s absolutely true.
     “The Google Story,” by David Vise and Mark Malseed, is not written by the company’s public relations department. The authors are investigative journalists with impeccable credentials (Vise is a Pulitzer Prize winner) who became fascinated by the Google phenomenon.
     Google is more than the latest revolutionary internet business — it is, without question or hyperbole, the best and most useful internet search engine. Although it’s a simple concept (founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren’t even close to being first-to-market in the search-engine category), Google’s impact has been so profound that the company’s name has entered our common vernacular. Googling, the act of searching for something (or someone) on the Google website, is a verb that’s synonymous with finding a wealth of information. Type in a few keywords and you get pages (and pages) of data and links regarding whatever topic you sought.
     And it’s not just for young hipsters. Cartoonist Gary Trudeau calls Google “the Swiss Army knife of information retrieval.” Its phenomenal impact, especially considering the company spent absolutely no money on advertising, fascinated authors Vise and Malseed. In researching this book, they interviewed more than 150 people: Google employees, Stanford professors, Wall Street analysts, even Larry Page’s old Cub Scout leader. Their thoroughness is apparent.
     While at times their enthusiasm overshadows their objectivity, Vise and Malseed chronicle the company’s rise from grad-student project to internet juggernaut, its superior groundbreaking technology and targeted-advertising system, the founders’ savvy deal-making abilities and their inevitable battles with Microsoft, Yahoo and nearly every Wall Street firm that wanted to underwrite Google’s initial public offering. We learn how several Silicon Valley firms (including Alta Vista) rejected the chance to buy Google for $1 million and how Google’s first investment check (handed to them with little fanfare at the end of a lunch meeting), was celebrated by a trip to Burger King.
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