Friday Video: I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

Author and former Googler Doug Edwards spoke to Googlers in Mountain View in July, 2011 about his book I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Doug is joined in conversation with David Krane. About the book: “I’m Feeling Lucky captures the unique, self-invented, yet profoundly important culture of the world’s most transformative corporation. Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to an Edsel. No academic analysis or bystander’s account can capture it. Now Doug Edwards, Employee Number 59, offers the first inside view of Google, giving readers a chance to fully experience the bizarre mix of camaraderie and competition at this phenomenal company. Edwards, Google’s first director of marketing and brand management, describes it as it happened. We see the first, pioneering steps of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s young, idiosyncratic partners; 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); the development of brand identity; the races to develop and implement each new feature; and the many ideas that never came to pass. Above all, Edwards—a former journalist who knows how to write—captures the “Google Experience,” the rollercoaster ride of being part of a company creating itself in a whole new universe.”