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Review
Imagine a world where nerds reign supreme...That is the universe that Douglas Edwards stepped into in 1999...Edwards was a fish out of water from the outset...His inside story is thus told from an outsider's point of view. For you and me, it's no bad thing...His insight into the minds of Page and Brin is instructive...a front-row seat to one the most extraordinary success stories of recent memory (Danny Fortson Sunday Times )
Douglas Edwards spent six years in the Googleplex as Google's first brand manager, and I'm Feeling Lucky is a rare insider's account of the company's birth pangs and its early years. He can personally vouch for the goodies. (James Harkin Financial Times )
[An] extremely useful insider guide...Douglas Edwards...walks into the maelstrom of a start-up full of twenty-somethings where visitors genuinely wonder "who trashed the chairman's office?" (Pat Kane The Independent )
An enjoyable account of the struggles a creative marketing guy faced in the early days of Google, when the company was run by geeks with a messianic faith in "Efficiency, Frugality, Integrity" (Andrew Keen New Scientist )
Douglas Edwards spent six years in the Googleplex as Google's first brand manager, and I'm Feeling Lucky is a rare insider's account of the company's birth pangs and its early years. He can personally vouch for the goodies. (James Harkin Financial Times )
[An] extremely useful insider guide...Douglas Edwards...walks into the maelstrom of a start-up full of twenty-somethings where visitors genuinely wonder "who trashed the chairman's office?" (Pat Kane The Independent )
An enjoyable account of the struggles a creative marketing guy faced in the early days of Google, when the company was run by geeks with a messianic faith in "Efficiency, Frugality, Integrity" (Andrew Keen New Scientist )
Product Description
Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to a wheelbarrow. No academic analysis or bystander's account can capture it. Now Douglas Edwards, Employee Number 59, takes readers inside the Googleplex for the closest look you can get without an ID card, giving readers a chance to fully experience the potent mix of camaraderie and competition that makes up the company that changed the world. Edwards, Google's first director of marketing and brand management, describes it as it happened. From the first, pioneering steps of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's young, idiosyncratic partners to the evolution of the company's famously nonhierarchical structure (where every employee finds a problem to tackle or a feature to create and works independently), through the physical endurance feats of the company's engineers (both on and off the roller-hockey field) to its ethos to always hire someone smarter than yourself, I'm Feeling Lucky captures for the first time the unique, self-invented, culture of the world's most transformative corporation. Welcome to the "Google Experience".
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
I wasn't expecting much from this book, fearing something tedious and overly-technical, dry and dull, but instead I found it was hugely enjoyable, fascinating, and extremely easy to read.
Doug Edwards was Google's 59th employee, joining the company in its infancy when the staff worked in one tiny building, made their own servers out of cork boards with components pinned to them (so they could fit four servers into the space normally occupied by one "proper" server in a rack cabinet) and focused entirely on making searching the internet faster, easier, and better. Doug sees the company grow and evolve, and he finds himself burning the midnight oil, often undermined by his managers, and eventually decides that the time is right to leave (the book ends in 2005.) There is also a fair amount of coverage of Google's battles with the likes of Inktomi, Yahoo and Microsoft, all of which is interesting, sometimes a little shocking.
Some have complained that the book has lots of padding but I didn't think this was the case at all. I actually found it quite riveting, often quite amusing, and surprisingly free of technical jargon, although the glossary of terms at the back is handy if you want to know the difference between a Noogler and a Xoogler for instance. Don't expect to find out the secrets of how Google's software works or what their corporate strategy is, or their future plans. Instead this book is a hugely enjoyable and very human tale of what it is like to work for a high-tech company that grew from nothing extremely quickly, and how they changed the world in their own way.
Quite possibly my favourite book of 2011 so far. I loved it.
Doug Edwards was Google's 59th employee, joining the company in its infancy when the staff worked in one tiny building, made their own servers out of cork boards with components pinned to them (so they could fit four servers into the space normally occupied by one "proper" server in a rack cabinet) and focused entirely on making searching the internet faster, easier, and better. Doug sees the company grow and evolve, and he finds himself burning the midnight oil, often undermined by his managers, and eventually decides that the time is right to leave (the book ends in 2005.) There is also a fair amount of coverage of Google's battles with the likes of Inktomi, Yahoo and Microsoft, all of which is interesting, sometimes a little shocking.
Some have complained that the book has lots of padding but I didn't think this was the case at all. I actually found it quite riveting, often quite amusing, and surprisingly free of technical jargon, although the glossary of terms at the back is handy if you want to know the difference between a Noogler and a Xoogler for instance. Don't expect to find out the secrets of how Google's software works or what their corporate strategy is, or their future plans. Instead this book is a hugely enjoyable and very human tale of what it is like to work for a high-tech company that grew from nothing extremely quickly, and how they changed the world in their own way.
Quite possibly my favourite book of 2011 so far. I loved it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
I found this book tedious and a little bit dull.
As interesting as the story of Google is, this account doesn't hold my interest. In fact my interest started to wane when I got a few pages in. The authors accounts and exaggerated or should I say enthusiastic descriptions all start to sound the same and get a tad boring. It's interesting enough if you're die hard about this stuff but for me, an I imagine most people, it's just a bit tedious.
But I guess as one other reviewer wrote, if someone wrote an account of AlstaVista, it wouldn't be as interesting, or at least relevant, to most people. Google is Google, everyone has heard of them but not many people will care about the detailed accounts this book goes into.
As interesting as the story of Google is, this account doesn't hold my interest. In fact my interest started to wane when I got a few pages in. The authors accounts and exaggerated or should I say enthusiastic descriptions all start to sound the same and get a tad boring. It's interesting enough if you're die hard about this stuff but for me, an I imagine most people, it's just a bit tedious.
But I guess as one other reviewer wrote, if someone wrote an account of AlstaVista, it wouldn't be as interesting, or at least relevant, to most people. Google is Google, everyone has heard of them but not many people will care about the detailed accounts this book goes into.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
If you were entranced watching the stratospheric rise of Google from fringe search engine to one of the largest economies on Earth, you'll enjoy many happy hours immersed in the pages of I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. If you appreciate Google's dogged insistence on creating a search engine that actually works as users want it to (rather than simply looking flashy), this book will resonate with you. If you consider the term 'computer nerd' a compliment rather than a put-down, you'll find nirvana in the pages of this book.
Douglas Edwards's descriptions of Google's key players, especially co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, give unique insights into the people behind one of the the world's biggest brand names. Brin and Page always had a clear vision of what they wanted Google to achieve. The most readable parts of the book are its humanising portraits of the men behind the brand name. For example, one Hallowe'en Sergey Brin conducted an interview wearing a full cow suit. As a nervous young prospective Google employee stuttered and stammered his way through the interview, Brin sat back on his chair and played with his rubber udders. Many such entertaining stories are peppered throughout the book, making it a must-have item for any Google aficionados. By reducing the amount of technical data included (about server sizes, speeds, etc.), Douglas Edwards could have increased the book's readability while cutting down its length, thereby helping his book to appeal to a wider market. As it stands, the lengthy tome is for hardcore Googlophiles only.
Douglas Edwards's descriptions of Google's key players, especially co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, give unique insights into the people behind one of the the world's biggest brand names. Brin and Page always had a clear vision of what they wanted Google to achieve. The most readable parts of the book are its humanising portraits of the men behind the brand name. For example, one Hallowe'en Sergey Brin conducted an interview wearing a full cow suit. As a nervous young prospective Google employee stuttered and stammered his way through the interview, Brin sat back on his chair and played with his rubber udders. Many such entertaining stories are peppered throughout the book, making it a must-have item for any Google aficionados. By reducing the amount of technical data included (about server sizes, speeds, etc.), Douglas Edwards could have increased the book's readability while cutting down its length, thereby helping his book to appeal to a wider market. As it stands, the lengthy tome is for hardcore Googlophiles only.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Fascinating stuff
I think if you're interested in the development of all things internet and don't mind a bit of the technical, this is great. Read more
Published 2 days ago by Book fiend
A nicely written biography of Google's brand manager
This is a very well written account of the life of one of Google's early employees while he worked for Google. Read more
Published 13 days ago by W. Ahmad
come in number 59 your time is up
I regard Google as one of the wonders of the present century, not just for the way that it made searching the internet easy and quick, but also in the way that it snuck in a new... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Don Panik
Somewhat repetitious but interesting!
This is a book to read slowly. It is rather hard going but, at the same time, very interesting. I have entitled it "repetitious" as you could open it at any one place and you... Read more
Published 1 month ago by H. S. Hallam
Interesting but disorganised
Douglas Edwards certainly has the ability to tell anecdotes, and his time at Google is certainly very interesting, giving many fascinating (to me, at least! Read more
Published 3 months ago by V. Nicholl
A fascinating insight into the early days of Google
This book gives a wonderful view of what it was like to work for one of the great computing giants during its early evolution. Read more
Published 3 months ago by John Nunn
Very revealing and a pleasing read.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found Edwards' perspectives, as it were outside the geekdom of Google's founding core, to be utterly fascinating. Read more
Published 4 months ago by bomble
Lose your self in the flex
The booked flowed along, at the right pace.
The book ends with him leaving and in a away I felt like I was leaving Google with him. Read more
The book ends with him leaving and in a away I felt like I was leaving Google with him. Read more
Published 4 months ago by S. P. Kindlen
Crazy Kindle pricing
The book may be good but the Kindle pricing isn't. To be clear, this isn't Amazon's fault. It's publishers getting greedy following the trend of the music business. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Richard Lewis
A true story about the early days at Google
This is an account by one of the earlier members of staff at the now giant Google.
Having once read rather similar accounts about Microsoft and, I think, the now largely... Read more
Having once read rather similar accounts about Microsoft and, I think, the now largely... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Claptonian
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