Google’s founding culture was a radical technical meritocracy contemptuous of mundane business

Evidence

Google’s unspoken motto has always been “We do it better”; its founding culture a radical meritocracy, where brilliant code and ingenious system design count above all. The early Page had no patience for less technical sides of the business, including things like marketing, administration, even raising or making money. Not that he thought he was above all that; rather, he believed, with some reason, that companies often wasted most of their time and energy on such mundane matters, at the expense of the true goal.*2 That, of course, was inventing and building beautiful, perfect tools that were outrageously better than those that came before. … However they could express this ideal they did. Why not have a campus where the food is both delicious and free, so you didn’t waste time in line at the cash register? Why not give away gigabits of free storage to users? Scan the world’s books? Drive trucks mounted with cameras through the streets everywhere and create a pictorial map? But nothing should be Googley-er than the flagship itself: and so Google search had to be not merely better than the rest but a thousand times better than those ugly and slow stepsisters, like Yahoo! and GoTo. The terms of Google’s self-styled triumph were indeed aesthetic. Where Google was fast, unadorned, and untouchable—Shining! Incorruptible!—it saw its rivals as essentially “sucky”—slow, festooned with advertising, and, ultimately, venal. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 881

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘Googley’ as the combination of counterintuitive radical solutions and uncompromising speed that shaped the company’s self-image.
• XREF: connects to: Google’s success stems from radical social relations, not technological prowess alone — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 69; Fear of financial obscurity drove Google founders to abandon founding principles — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 264; Google by 1999 had no revenue mechanism and thus was not yet capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 219 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Early Google staff embedded counterculture values like Burning Man into company culture. #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 920
• Google’s founders reluctantly accepted advertising only as an economic necessity #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 884
• Google’s founders initially opposed advertising as inherently biasing search toward advertisers #exemplifies (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 220