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I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Paperback – 28 Jul 2011

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Douglas Edwards (Author)
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Douglas Edwards (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars 104 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Paperback: 432 pages
  • Publisher: Allen Lane; Open Market ed edition (28 July 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1846145139
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846145131
  • Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 13.6 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (104 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,317,302 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

Hilarious (Bloomberg)

[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)

A rare insider's account. He can personally vouch for the goodies (Financial Times)

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) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

One of Google s Early Employees Takes Us on a Trip Inside the Hyperenergized Company That Broke the Rules and Rocked the World.

Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to an Edsel. In its infancy, Google embraced extremes endless days fueled by unlimited free food, nonstop data-based debates, and blood-letting hockey games. The company s fresh-from-grad-school leaders sought more than old notions of success; they wanted to make all the information in the world available to everyone instantly. Google, like the Big Bang, was a singularity an explosive release of raw intelligence and unequaled creative energy and while others have described what Google accomplished, no one has explained how it felt to be a part of it. Until now.
Douglas Edwards, employee number 59, offers the first inside view of what it was like to be a Googler. Experience the unnerving mix of camaraderie and competition as Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company s idiosyncratic young partners, create a famously nonhierarchical structure, fight against conventional wisdom, and race to implement a myriad of new features while coolly burying broken ideas and wounded products. I m Feeling Lucky captures for the first time the self-invented culture of the world s most transformative corporation and offers unique access to the emotions, particularly the tensions, experienced by those who built overnight one of the world s best-known brands.
" --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsFascinating and hugely enjoyable
By Peter Lee TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on 15 July 2011
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( 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.
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5.0 out of 5 starsInside Track of Life in the Googleplex
By Brett H TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on 21 Jun. 2011
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
Most people know that Google is a bit special. To evolve from a two man operation in 1996 to become one of America's biggest companies, not far short of Microsoft or Apple, is some achievement. Clearly they only did this by breaking the mould in a fairly significant way. It is pretty obvious that they are different. You only have to look at their main webpage to appreciate this. As the book explains, it is not so much what is there, but what is not there. The leading search engine in the late 1990s was Yahoo and their main page was so crammed with facts, adverts, links etc, that it was quite hard to spot the search box. Google decided early on to go in a completely different direction and keep their main page very simple. That is the way it is to this day, mimicked by the likes of Bing, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. They have never been afraid to be different and to think outside of the box.

The author was Google's 59th hire, hence the title of the book and joined the company in 1999. He was employed to head up marketing rather than being a techie in a very tech led company. This book covers his experiences between 1999 and 2005 and is a fascinating insight into how the company was run and what made it different. Google had a very flat management structure so everyone got involved in all aspects of the organisation and you get the inside track from Douglas Edwards on how these decisions were made. Innovation covered every aspect of Google. For example, unlike most start up internet companies, they did not go for state of the art hardware. Instead they put together a huge number of the cheapest servers they could cobble together and did not worry when some of them failed as there was always redundant capacity.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsPerfect for Googlophiles
By HeavyMetalManitou VINE VOICE on 16 Nov. 2011
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( 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.
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3.0 out of 5 starsA good story of Google in the early days
By Evan VINE VOICE on 23 Nov. 2011
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( 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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Great behind the scene insights

Published 7 months ago by Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 starsNothing special....

The book gives an account of Google growth, politics and personalities in its early days. Little if any technical content. Read more

Published 9 months ago by RolyM
4.0 out of 5 starsLooking at Google homepage will never be the same again!

Very good book
Ten years ago I was a computer nerd/engineer, so the descriptions of the techie/business decisions were wonderful to me! Read more

Published 17 months ago by Ellie
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Great Item ★ Well Packaged ★ Super Fast Delivery ★ Would Buy From Again!! - A***

Published 21 months ago by KAYSAN FOTOVAT
4.0 out of 5 starswell worth sticking with

You would have to be very interested in the early days of Google, the search giant, to know who Douglas Edwards is. Read more

Published on 9 Oct. 2014 by tallmanbaby
4.0 out of 5 starsAn intersting look at the early years of Google

This book is the first book I have read about the early years of Google and as expected from a company that has done so much in so little time, it is a truly interesting read. Read more

Published on 25 Sept. 2014 by GOTTON
4.0 out of 5 starsEnjoyable read

I enjoyed this book and liked the insight it gave into Google although it's obviously a personal opinion by the author.

Published on 25 May 2014 by slavender
4.0 out of 5 starsInteresting reading

This was an excellent insight into beginnings of Google from the early days. Only really appeals I think if you are interested in start ups and/or technology. Read more

Published on 20 Nov. 2013 by Chris
1.0 out of 5 starsInteresting, but...

Interesting but the narrative is disrupted by the author using obscure words unnecessarily in order to appear smart. E.g. "... Read more

Published on 25 Jun. 2013 by Matt Whitby
4.0 out of 5 starsAn excellent portrait into the role of words in google

just writing to say i disagree with the early reviews that don't show what a good book this is. it is a very interesting account of the most interesting period of the most... Read more

Published on 1 May 2013 by David McNeil

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