I'm Feeling Lucky

This past week I finished reading Douglas Edwards' I'm Feeling Lucky, which is probably the best book on startup life I have read. Most books on Google tend to lionize Larry Page and Sergey Brin but they were merely supporting characters in Edwards' memoir. What struck me again and again about this book though, was the shear amount of personal growth required of Edwards coming from a bigger business background. He was a marketer by vocation, and thus somewhat of an outsider to the technical goings on. This perspective sometimes leads to him to leave out details someone like me would be interested in, but on the other hand he captures the feel of the office in a way that might have been weighted down with such details. It was also kind of fun to read about his interacting with his nemesis, Marissa Mayer, who has since also left Google to become CEO of Yahoo. I think Aaron Swartz summed it up best though in his review, wondering "How did he get away with writing this? Google apparently approved of the project and had chaperones in all his interviews, but nonetheless the book is just full of revelations and shockers that it's hard to imagine Google would ever want to see the light of day." Discovering his blog I also realized how meagre my 50 books a year goal is. Finishing Edwards book represented the achievement of that goal for this year, but Swartz often more than doubled that. Reading about the happy accidents of smart people (Gmail, Adsense, etc) was probably just as enjoyable though. Then there were the misses: Froogle, Orkut and the like. Seeing how the company dynamics led to those failures is also instructive.