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"><i class="sprites aim"></i></a> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/author/nicholas-carlson/rss" data-toggle="tooltip" data-placement="top" title="" data-original-title="RSS feed"><i class="fa fa-rss"></i></a> <a href="http://twitter.com/nichcarlson" data-toggle="tooltip" data-placement="top" title="" data-original-title="Twitter feed"><i class="fa fa-twitter"></i></a> <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/1/116568578395534463017?rel=author" data-toggle="tooltip" data-placement="top" title="" data-original-title="Google+"><i class="fa fa-google-plus"></i></a> </div> </span> <br/> <span> <span class="date-heat"> <span class="date" data-bi-format="date" rel="1398347340">Apr. 24, 2014, 9:49 AM</span> </span> </span> <span class="pageviews"><span class="sprites fire views" title="views">286,248</span></span> <span title="Read comments" class="comments ks-read-comments-top"> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4#comments" class="views sprites comments-icon"></a> <a class="comment_count" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4#comments">40</a> </span> </span> </div> </div>  <div class="share">  <div class="share-container ks-share-top clearfix" style="display:block;">  <ul class="rrssb-buttons rrssb-top clearfix"> <li class="facebook ks-byline-fb"> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4" title="facebook" class="popup"> <i class="fa fa-facebook-square"></i> <span class="text">facebook</span> </a> </li> <li class="linkedin ks-byline-linkedin"> <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4&title=The Untold Story Of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback&summary=One day in July 2001, Larry Page decided to..." title="linkedin" class="popup"> <i class="fa fa-linkedin"></i> <span class="text">linkedin</span> </a> </li> <li class="twitter ks-byline-tweet"> <a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4&via=sai&text=The Untold Story Of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback" title="twitter" class="popup"> <i class="fa fa-twitter"></i> <span class="text">twitter</span> </a> </li> <li class="googleplus ks-byline-gplusone"> <a href="https://plus.google.com/share?url=http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4" title="google+" class="popup"> <i class="fa fa-google-plus"></i> <span class="text">google+</span> </a> </li> <li class="printbtn ks-byline-print"> <a href="javascript:window.print()" title="print"> <i class="fa fa-print"></i> <span class="text">print</span> </a> </li> <li class="email button-email ks-byline-email" data-href="http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4"> <a href="#" title="email"> <i class="fa fa-envelope-o"></i> <span class="text">email</span> </a> </li> </ul>  </div>  </div> </div>   <div class="clear-both"> <div class="KonaBody post-content"> <p><div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image"><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5355bcd169bedd0334bfeb94-1200-900/larry%20page%20cover%20graphic_01.jpg" border="0" alt="Larry Page: The Untold Story" width="800" /><p class="source"><span>Illustration by Mike Nudelman</span></p></div><p></div></p> <p>One day in July 2001, Larry Page decided to fire Google’s project managers. All of them.</p> <p>It was just five years since Page, then a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, was struck in the middle of the night with a vision. In it, he somehow managed to download the entire Web and by examining the links between the pages he saw the world’s information in an entirely new way.</p> <p>What Page wrote down that night became the basis for an algorithm. He called it PageRank and used it to power a new Web search engine called BackRub. The name didn’t stick.</p> <p>By July 2001, BackRub had been renamed Google and was doing really well. It had millions of users, an impressive list of investors, and 400 employees, including about a half-dozen project managers.</p> <p>As at most startups, in Google’s first year there were no management layers between the CEO, Page, and the engineers. But as the company grew, it added a layer of managers, people who could meet with Page and the rest of Google’s senior executives and give the engineers prioritized orders and deadlines.</p> <p>Page, now 28, hated it. Since Google hired only the most talented engineers, he thought that extra layer of supervision was not just unnecessary but also an impediment. He also suspected that Google’s project managers were steering engineers away from working on projects that were personally important to him. For example, Page had outlined a plan to scan all the world’s books and make them searchable online, but somehow no one was working on it. Page blamed the project managers.</p> <p>Some dramatic streamlining was called for, he resolved. Instead of the project managers, all of Google’s engineers would report to one person, a newly hired VP of engineering named Wayne Rosing, and Rosing would report directly to him.</p> <p>Google’s human resources boss, a serious woman with bangs named Stacey Sullivan, thought Page’s plan was nuts, according to “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009F7CVP6/" target="_blank">I'm Feeling Lucky</a>,” Douglas Edwards' inside view of Google's early years. Sullivan told Page so. “You can’t just self-organize!” she said. “People need someone to go to when they have problems!”</p> <p>Page ignored her.</p> <p>Sullivan took her concerns to Eric Schmidt. In March, Schmidt had become the chairman of Google. Everyone assumed he’d be CEO as soon as he could leave his full-time job as CEO of Novell.</p> <p>Schmidt agreed with Sullivan. So did Page’s executive coach, Bill Campbell. Everyone called Campbell “Coach” because he’d once been Columbia University's football coach. He still walked and talked like he was pacing a sideline.</p> <p>As Steven Levy detailed in his own rollicking Google history, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1416596585/" target="_blank">In the Plex</a>,” one evening, Campbell got into a big argument with Page about his plan. To prove his point, Campbell brought engineer after engineer into Page’s office to offer their perspective. One after another, they told Page that they actually preferred to have a manager — someone who could end disagreements and give their teams direction.</p> <p>But Page was determined.</p> <p>Schmidt in particular may have been the worst person for Sullivan to turn to for help back then. Page had never been behind hiring him — or any CEO, for that matter. Google’s investors made him do it.</p> <p>Before long, Schmidt might have presented an obstacle to Page’s plan. But not yet. It was July 2001 and Schmidt hadn’t officially become CEO. So Page went ahead.</p> <p>He deputized Rosing to break the news.</p> <p>That afternoon, all 130 or so engineers and a half-dozen project managers showed up. They stood outside Page’s office amid Google’s mismatched cubicles and couches — which, like the rest of the company’s office furniture, had been bought from failed startups on the cheap.</p> <p>Finally, Rosing, a bald man in glasses, began to speak. Rosing explained that engineering was getting a reorganization: All engineers would now report to him, all project managers were out of a job.</p> <p>The news did not go over well. The project managers were stunned. They hadn’t been warned. They’d just been fired in front of all their colleagues.</p> <p>The engineers demanded an explanation. So Page gave one. With little emotion, speaking in his usual flat, robotic tone, he explained that he didn’t like having non-engineers supervising engineers. Engineers shouldn't have to be supervised by managers with limited tech knowledge. Finally, he said, Google’s project managers just weren’t doing a very good job.</p> <p>As Page talked, he kept his gaze averted, resisting direct eye contact. Though he was an appealing presence with above-average height and nearly black hair, he was socially awkward.</p> <p>The news was met with a chorus of grumbling. Finally, one of the engineers in the room, Ron Dolin, started yelling at Page. He said an all-hands meeting was no place to give a performance review. What Page was doing was “completely ridiculous,” he said, and “totally unprofessional.”</p> <p>“It sucked,” one of the project managers present said later. “I felt humiliated by it. Larry said in front of the company that we didn't need managers, and he talked about what he didn't like about us. He said things that hurt a lot of people.”</p> <p>In the end, the layoffs didn’t stick. The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization, under the leadership of Urs Hözle.</p> <p>Page’s reorganization didn’t last long either. While some engineers thrived without supervision, problems arose. Projects that needed resources didn’t get them. Redundancy became an issue. Engineers craved feedback and wondered where their careers were headed.</p> <p>Eventually, Google started hiring project managers again.</p> <p>“I did my best to advise that there is true value in management, and you can set a tone by how you manage this,” Stacy Sullivan recalled in “I'm Feeling Lucky.” “Hopefully it was a lesson learned for Larry.”</p> <p>By August 2001, Schmidt had fully extricated himself from his responsibilities at Novell. He became Google’s CEO — so-called adult supervision for Page and his co-founder, Brin.</p> <p>And for a long time, Larry Page was very unhappy.</p> <p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/51fa8230ecad04d34600000b-1200-924/early-google-employees-1.jpg" border="0" alt="early google employees" /><p class="source"><span>Early Googler</span></p><p class='caption'>Google, 1999</p></div><p></div></div>Everyone knows the Steve Jobs story — how he was fired from the company he founded — Apple — only to return from exile decades later to save the business.</p> <p>What’s less-well understood is that Apple’s board and investors were absolutely right to fire Jobs. Early in his career, he was petulant, mean, and destructive. Only by leaving Apple, humbling himself, and finding a second success (with Pixar) was he able to mature into the leader who would return to Apple and build it into the world’s most-valuable company.</p> <p>Larry Page is the Steve Jobs of Google.</p> <p>Like Jobs, Page has a co-founder, Sergey Brin, but Page has always been his company’s true visionary and driving force.</p> <p>And just as Apple’s investors threw Jobs out of his company, Google’s investors ignored Page’s wishes and forced him to hire a CEO to be adult supervision.</p> <p>Both then underwent a long period in the wilderness. Steve Jobs’ banishment was more severe, but Page also spent years at a remove from the day-to-day world of Google.</p> <p>As with Jobs, it was only through this long exile that Page was able to mature into a self-awareness of his strengths and weaknesses.</p> <p>Then, like Jobs, Page came back with wild ambitions and a new resolve.</p> <h2><strong>Lawrence Edward Page</strong></h2> <p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/5203e5da69beddbd1200000b-711-920/n.tesla.jpg" border="0" alt="Nikola Tesla" width="480" /><p class="source"><span><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/N.Tesla.JPG">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></p><p class='caption'>Nikola Tesla</p></div><p></div></p> <p>On the cold, clear night of Jan. 7, 1943, Nikola Tesla quietly slept in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker, 33 floors above the streets of Manhattan. Suddenly, his chest erupted in pain. Then his heart stopped.</p> <p>A day later, a hotel maid decided to ignore a “do not disturb” sign on Tesla’s door. She found his body. The great inventor was dead.</p> <p>A Serbian immigrant born in 1856, Tesla invented the way almost all of the world’s electricity is generated today. He also envisioned and created wireless communication. But he died having spent the better part of his last decade collecting a pension and feeding pigeons, unable to persuade new investors to fund his latest wild visions. He died believing he could invent a weapon to end all war, a way for power to travel wirelessly across the oceans, and plan for harnessing energy from space. He died alone and in debt.</p> <p>Tesla was a brilliant man. He spoke eight languages and had a photographic memory. Inventions would appear in his mind fully formed. But he was lousy at business.</p> <p>In 1885, he told his boss, Thomas Edison, that he could improve his motors and generators. Edison told him, “There's $50,000 in it for you — if you can do it.” Tesla did as he’d promised, and in return Edison gave him a $10 raise.</p> <p>Tesla quit. He formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. But he soon disagreed with his investors over the direction of the business. They fired him, and he was forced to dig ditches for a year.</p> <p>In 1900 he persuaded JPMorgan to invest $150,000 in another company. The money was gone by 1901. Tesla spent the rest of his life writing JPMorgan asking for more money. He never got it.</p> <p>The year after Tesla died, in 1944, New York Herald Tribune journalist John Joseph O’Neill wrote a biography about the inventor, who had been a friend.</p> <p>“During the last three decades of his life, it is probable that not one out of tens of thousands who saw him knew who he was,” the biography, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Genius-Life-Nikola-Tesla/dp/1931882851/" target="_blank">Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla</a>,” concludes.</p> <p>“Even when the newspapers, once a year, would break out in headlines about Tesla and his latest predictions concerning scientific wonders to come, no one associated that name with the excessively tall, very lean man, wearing clothes of a bygone era, who almost daily appeared to feed his feathered friends.”</p> <p>“He was just one of the strange individuals of whom it takes a great many of varying types to make up a complete population of a great metropolis.”</p> <p>Forty-one years after those words were published, in 1985, a 12-year-old in Michigan finished reading Tesla's biography and cried.</p> <p>That was Larry Page.</p> <p>The child of a pair of computer science professors at Michigan State University, Larry grew up in a messy house. There were computers, gadgets, and tech magazines everywhere. The atmosphere — and Page’s attentive parents — fostered creativity and invention.</p> <p>In that moment, Page realized it wasn’t enough to envision an innovative technological future. Big ideas aren’t enough. They need to be commercialized. If Page wanted to be an inventor, he was going to have to start a successful company, too.</p> <p>Tesla’s story also taught Page to watch out for the Thomas Edisons of the world — people who will use you and place your dreams in the service of their own cynical ends.</p> <p><div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image"><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/5357f6cc6da8113d5b4608ff-1200-858/rtr17usq.jpg" border="0" alt="Larry Page" width="800" /><p class="source"><span>Reuters</span></p></div><p></div></p> <h2><strong>Larry’s Rules For Management</strong></h2> <p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4dbafb7b49e2ae3e771c0000-398-287/larry_sergey_good.jpg" border="0" alt="Sergey Brin and Larry Page" /><p class="source"><span><a href="http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2011/04/tgif-show-from-1999.html">Doug Edwards, Xooglers</a></span></p></div><p></div></div></p> <p>Google incorporated on Sept. 4, 1998 — two years after the idea of ranking Web pages by their inbound links came to Page in a dream. He made himself CEO, and his best friend, Sergey Brin, was named co-founder.</p> <p>Co-founders are often forgotten by history. Steve Jobs had two at Apple. Mark Zuckerberg had four at Facebook.</p> <p>Sergey Brin was a different kind of sidekick to Page. They had met at Stanford, where Brin was outgoing and energetic, known among professors for his habit of bursting into their offices without knocking.</p> <p>To Page’s startup-turned-global-technology company, Brin would bring a much-needed extroversion that Page lacked. Brin excelled at strategy, branding, and developing relationships between Google and other companies. He was a partner to Page, if, ultimately, a junior one.</p> <p>While Google is often thought of as the invention of two young computer whizzes — Sergey and Larry, Larry and Sergey — the truth is that Google is a creation of Larry Page, helped along by Sergey Brin.</p> <p>Page and Brin had raised $1 million from friends and family to launch their startup, moving off Stanford’s campus and into a rented garage.</p> <p>By February 1999, the startup had already outgrown the garage, relocating to an office above a bike shop in Palo Alto, California. Seven months later, Google outgrew that office, moving to a nondescript building in an office park a couple of miles off the highway in nearby Mountain View.</p> <p>Outside that building, in an asphalt parking lot, yellow police tape marked off an area where Page, Brin, and the rest of Google’s employees — Googlers, they called themselves — played roller hockey. The games were full contact. Employees wore pads and would come back inside from games drenched in sweat and sometimes bloodied and bruised. “No one held back when fighting the founders for the puck,” Douglas Edwards wrote. “The harder you played, the more respect you earned.”</p> <p>Inside the beige office building, the game was twice as tough. Yes, there was free food for all employees and a massage therapist on site. And, with brightly colored exercise balls and couches everywhere, the place looked like a kindergarten crossed with a freshman dorm.</p> <p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5355f3b66da81162126301e1-473-236/early-google-employees-1.png" border="0" alt="early google employees" /><p class="source"><span><a href="http://ledbook.edublogs.org/2012/07/20/the-earliest-20-googler-still-there？/">Ledblook.edublogs</a></span></p></div><p></div></div></p> <p>But for Page’s employees, working at Google felt more like a never-ending thesis defense. Everywhere you looked, there were know-it-alls ready to gleefully tear into you. Page had originally bonded with Brin over a day of fierce argument, and that’s how the relationship grew. Their debates were not shouting matches. They were a series of blunt points made by one side, and then the other, with a little name-calling thrown in. Page would call one of Brin’s ideas stupid. Brin would say Page’s idea was naive. They’d both called each other bastards.</p> <p>Page never felt any deterioration of his friendship with Brin after these fights, so he styled his interaction with other Googlers in the same unvarnished way. Page once told a room full of Google’s first marketing employees that their profession was built on an ability to lie.</p> <p>Page had a tendency to communicate through emphatic body language. He’d lift an eyebrow in a way that made you know he thought your idea was stupid. If you said something that made him angry or uncomfortable, he’d respond in a quieter tone, and wouldn’t be able to look at you while he did it.</p> <p>He became infamous for his lack of social grace. A slow-loading application during a product demonstration would prompt him to start counting out loud.</p> <p>“One one-thousand.”</p> <p>“Two one-thousand.”</p> <p>Page encouraged his senior executives to fight the way he and Brin went at it. In meetings with new hires, one of the two co-founders would often provoke an argument over a business or product decision. Then they would both sit back, watching quietly as their lieutenants verbally cut each other down. As soon as any argument started to go circular, Page would say, “I don't want to talk about this anymore. Just do it.”</p> <p>It wasn’t that he was a tyrant. It’s just that he connected to people over their ideas, not their feelings.</p> <p>Early Google HR boss Heather Cairns remembers once spotting Page talking intently with Google’s janitor after work hours.</p> <p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/5355f438ecad04b533bfeb97-400-300/google-hr-heather-cairns-1999.jpg" border="0" alt="Google HR Heather Cairns 1999" /><p class='caption'>Heather Cairns</p></div><p></div></div></p> <p>She later asked Page what they were talking about so seriously.</p> <p>“I want to know how everyone does their job,” he replied, going on to offer a detailed recitation of the janitor’s method for placing empty trash bags at the bottom of each barrel so he could replace them easily.</p> <p>“It’s very efficient,” Page said approvingly, “and he saves time doing that, and I learned from that.”</p> <p>Page hadn’t been a social child. But in college and graduate school, he’d been able to connect with people over external abstractions: visions of the future, cool technologies. At Google, he kept his interaction with employees on this level. He managed without regard to feelings.</p> <p>Asked about his approach to running the company, Page once told a Googler his method for solving complex problems was by reducing them to binaries, then simply choosing the best option. Whatever the downside he viewed as collateral damage he could live with.</p> <p>When Page went to Stanford after receiving his bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Michigan, he expected he’d have to make a choice between becoming an academic and building a company. Choosing the former would mean giving up the opportunity to become the inventor of widely used applications. But building a company would force him to deal with people in a way he didn’t enjoy. For Google’s first few years, he got to have the best of both worlds: He was building a product that millions of people used, and he created an interpersonal culture intensely focused on ideas and outcomes rather than emotional niceties.</p> <p>For many years, Google thrived under this type of management.</p> <p>For many employees, the combative atmosphere was a reasonable price to pay for working at a company with a real clarity of purpose.</p> <p>Even in cases where the environment left bruises, solid ideas won. In “In The Plex,” Steven Levy tells the story of how, in 2000, Google hired an associate product manager named Wesley Chan and put him in charge of building something called Google Toolbar, a way for users to search without having to open Microsoft Explorer. Chan figured out that no one was using it because it didn’t do anything special for users. He decided it could double as a pop-up-ad blocker.</p> <p>He pitched the idea to Page in a meeting.</p> <p>“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!” Page replied. “Where did we find you?”</p> <p>Chan was undaunted, however. Shortly thereafter,