I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Paperback - 2012

Summary

From the jacket 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.
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Media reviews

I’m Feeling Lucky is funny, revealing, and instructive, with an insider’s perspective I hadn’t seen anywhere before. I thought I had followed the Google story closely, but I realized how much I’d missed after reading—and enjoying—this book." —James Fallows, author of Postcards from Tomorrow Square "Douglas Edwards is indeed lucky, sort of an accidental millionaire, a reluctant bystander in a sea of computer geniuses who changed the world. This is a rare look at what happened inside the building of the most important company of our time."—Seth Godin, author of Linchpin

"This is the first Google book told from the inside out. The teller is an ex-employee who joined Google early and who treats readers to vivid inside stories of what life was like before Google became a verb. Douglas Edwards recounts Google's stumble and rise with verve and humor and a generosity of spirit. He kept me turning the pages of this engrossing tale." —Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It