Edwards’s previous jobs had done little to prepare him for an office in which fellow employees scarfed down bowls of free M&Ms and slept (sometimes with their pets) on the furniture. He quickly found that at Google, age and work experience – especially time spent at other companies – didn’t matter much. When he was first hired by Google, at age 41, Edwards was a sage parental figure (driving “a station wagon that smelled like baby wipes and spit-up”) in a company dominated by 20-something techies fresh out of Stanford University. Or at least, before coming to Google, he thought he did.Įdwards joined Google early enough – and remained long enough – to witness a meteoric rise almost unparalleled in corporate history.

Far from being a computer programmer or software engineer, Edwards was hired because he understood brand management and public relations. Edwards had the dubious distinction of being one of the first nonengineers to crack into the playing roster of a company that continues to be driven by a technical mind-set. Was Page’s audacious boast accurate? Was Google really never wrong?Įdwards has written I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 about the six years (from 1999 to 2005) he spent working as a marketer for the company. Today the company occupies the rarefied strata of firms boasting multibillion-dollar profits. But Google marched boldly through this – and many subsequent – storms. The collapse of the dotcom bubble in March 2000, however, left many techies out of work, and worse, out of money. “When were we ever wrong?” Google cofounder Larry Page once asked Douglas Edwards, Google’s online brand manager and its 59th employee hired.īorn in a rented garage at the height of the technology boom in September 1998, Google emerged at a moment when everything seemed to be right in Silicon Valley.

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