Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Xoogler Doug Edwards Talks About New Book on His Time at the Search Borg (Video)

From 1999 until 2005, Doug Edwards was director of consumer marketing and brand management for Google, coming to the then-tiny search start-up from a business job at the San Jose Mercury News.

While there, the exec got a front row seat at the birth of what would become one of the most powerful tech companies in Silicon Valley and perhaps the best known digital brand ever for consumers.

While he didn’t kiss-and-tell for a while after leaving, Edwards said he could not get his experience there out of his brain, so he finally decided to write it all down in a book that just came out to pretty decent reviews.

And, indeed, “I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59” is a pretty fair rendition of those times and the insane pace of what it is like to be at a rocket ship of a start-up.

It also includes a story I had long forgotten, when current CEO Larry Page asked me — I covered Google at the time for The Wall Street Journal — to help pen its famous investor essay for its 2004 IPO. I declined and he got another journalist to do it, but Edwards got it right.

Here’s my video interview with Edwards, as well as a video he shot in 1999 of Google’s TGIF all-hands meeting, the last time Page was CEO (he’s back again, of course):

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google