The Voice of Google

Summary

This voice-of-Google thing—­a code I’d cracked for generating corpspeak with personality—­slowly became a hot commodity. The company relied heavily on the rhetoric of “culture” to keep tens of thousands of workers energized, giving a hundred and ten per cent. If work was going to be like a family, then it had to sound like one—maximally friendly, quirky, virtuous, Googley. So, in early 2011, when Larry Page became the C.E.O., replacing the veteran tech executive Eric Schmidt, I was looped in to help craft Larry’s internal messaging.Eric had pontificated plenty, but Larry was the epitome of techno-­optimism: Google wasn’t just going to organize the world’s information, he maintained; it was going to solve humanity’s biggest problems. In 2013, he launched Calico, a health-care company focussed on extending the human life span, and Time magazine ran a cover story with the headline “Can Google Solve Death?” “We need moon shots,” Larry would say, big, world-­changing ideas and initiatives, to make employees excited about innovating again. (Curing cancer wasn’t necessarily a moon shot, he once suggested, since it would only extend the average human life span by about three years.) His aphorisms stacked up like motivational posters in a middle-school science classroom—“Have a healthy disregard for the impossible,” “If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things”—but Larry seemed to experience them all as fresh revelations, and he expected them to invigorate the workforce in turn. He loved to tell a story about how he’d read an autobiography of Nikola Tesla when he was around twelve, and cried—­he really emphasized the crying bit—­because Tesla died poor. (This, I guess, taught him the all-­important life lesson “Commercialize those inventions.”) “Computers should do the hard work,” Larry would repeat, so humans can get back to doing what humans do best: learning, living, and loving.Larry reorganized the company around a handful of key pr...