Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) A Google Civil War? With Bloomberg's Mark Bergen

Episode Date: December 7, 2019

I had already reached out to Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen this week to talk about the Google Civil War, but then, of course, there was other big Google news this week. So, come for the assessment of Google’s culture at the moment but stay for an assessment of regime change and a lot more. Sponsors: Metalab Mealime Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. I had actually already reached out to Bloomberg's Mark Bergen this week to talk about the Google Civil War.

But then, of course, there was other big Google news this week. So come for the assessment of Google's ongoing culture conflicts and stay for an assessment of regime change at Google and a whole lot more. You know, Mark, as we just said, we were going to talk about Google anyway, but then, you know, news broke this week. You know, what everybody said about this changing of the guard thing was that it was sort of surprising, but not at all a surprise. So, I mean, this was probably coming at some point anyway, but is there anything that we can take in terms of, of why it's happening now? Yeah, I mean, the, it's like sort of when the dust settled four years ago on Alphabet, right? Because initially when they created Alphabet, that was sort of shocking to the world.

And certainly to people at Google. But then, you know, a day later or so, okay, this is, you know, Larry had effectively receded and given up a lot of the day-to-day managerial duties as soon as are anyway. In much the same way, I think what is surprising about this is that we've never got sense say that like Sundar was involved in like um making decisions about the allocating capital to Waymo and to Verily and to some of the other bets like right the other bets um i mean so he joined the board i think it was last year um and that way like so yes he certainly had on the board he had um responsibility for that but there was never i've never come across anything from the like

the official messaging of the company or even really in the reporting that's like you know I think of another alphabet company, right, like Loon doing the sort of telecom networks with the helium balloons in the sky. And you never hear about Loon having to pitch Sundar on its budget for the next year. And now that's something that's part of his job description officially. So that's probably, I'd say, like the biggest change where that has been, you know, the past four years, whenever we've asked the company what Larry and Sergey have been doing, and they say they're working on all the other bets. So your impression was, is they were the ones allocating that capital.

They were the ones doing the whatever check-ins in terms of how Loon is doing, how Waymo is doing. They were still engaged in the other bets part of it? Yeah, I think that's still an open question about sort of how much they're engaged and how much they've been engaged in the past four years. I think in some of the reporting I've had that Larry Page was certainly involved with Google Fiber, for instance, which was another bet like in 2016. and has the both of founders, especially Larry, care a lot about autonomous vehicles. There's evidence that they were definitely involved in that they lost it with Uber and Waymo. And certainly, like, Sergei's had a strong interest in some of the Google X projects and some of the healthcare work. But, you know, certainly, Rif Porat, who has been the joint CEO, CFO, sorry, of Google and Alphabet,

isn't involved in all those decisions and probably much more hands-on. I think Alphabet has its own sort of team working for RIFT and each of some of the larger Alphabet companies have their own sort of like in the past four years build up their own management teams and corporate structure. And that's been the official line for the company is like, okay, now those management teams and corporate structures are now sort of mature enough that they don't necessarily need the founders involved as much as they did before. Yeah.

All right. So what I said this week on the show was at the time that the alphabet thing happened, an ex-Gougler said to me, you know, Brian, the simple thing is, is like, Larry and Cirque don't care about the day-to-day of running the Google business. The Google business is fantastic. It's just, you know, they really do want to change the world. they really do, are shooting for the moon and things like that. Is there anything we can read into the fact that they're stepping back from the thing that this person ostensibly told me was designed to keep them engaged?

Like, is it that maybe the self-driving cars haven't happened soon enough and things like that? Yeah, I think at this point it's sort of pure speculation, both on my part and then certainly the people I've talked to. So I don't know. I mean, the other speculative action that people talk about, and I don't necessarily think this is true, is that neither of the founders have been particularly interested in over the past 22 decades in political and regulatory issues, and so much the companies facing arguably a lot more of regulatory and political pressure than it ever has before. Why do they need the hassle of going before Congress?

That's for people like marketing. Zuckerberg, who still seemingly have a vision for whatever. Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, go back to 2011 and Larry Page was the official CEO, but they, the company, and I don't know the official, how this actually sort of went down, but the company ended up sending Eric Schmidt, who is the chairman and former CEO and obviously much more comfortable sort of being in front of Congress and playing that role. So there's that argument, which could be partially true. there's the, as far as timing, there is, I don't necessarily know. I mean, certainly,

Waymo has the public narrative and a lot of the, in people you talk to in autonomous vehicles, is yes, they've not made as much progress as, you know, Sergey Brin was talking about even five years ago or four years ago. But I don't see, like, it seems like they're still being invested in, and John Craptich is still a CEO. So there's no real indication. that the founders have lost faith in that effort. The same could be said for Verily, which is now raising a lot of outside money and like sort of shaping up in this way

where they have Google Alphabet is sort of one of many stakeholders. Yeah, and everybody is seemingly super hot on health care all of a sudden. Yeah, and Google, I mean, which also has been a little bit strange as a Google has Google hired someone to run Google Health, The cloud business is also doing Google Hall, DeepMind, which is a separate alphabet company, had a healthcare effort. That effort's been folded into Google, proper. I mean, there have been so many sort of moving pieces in the alphabet empire.

And I think you could make the argument, Nest, right, what started off as a sort of prototypical alphabet company, right? It had its own brand, its own email addresses. Tony Fidel, when he was running Nest with its own. And he would always say, you know, we're not a Google company. And Alphabet gave him plenty of cover. And then fast forward to 2018 and Nest as part of Google and Google hardware. So there is a sound argument for the fact that some of the reasons why Alphabet was formed don't make any more sense. What's your take on Sundar Pichai as the leader of the company vis-a-vis the rank and file and the Googlers?

What do you think, what are you hearing from them about this changing of the guard? Yeah, what I can say is, I mean, go back to, we published this story. I think it was earlier this year about, so every year, I think it was January this year, every year Google puts out, like many companies, rather, and sort of feedback in the surveys, they call it Google Geist. And that from numbers that we saw on our reporting, Sundar, like the faith in Sundar's leadership dropped. And I think it was somewhere, I don't remember exactly, but somewhere at like the 70% range down from like the 80s or 90s. So it's not like still like if he was a president

and it's still an overwhelming support internally. And I do this is with something that people certainly on the public relations team say. And I think there's truth to it that a vast majority of the 100,000 plus people with the company, it's an amazing job. It pays well. Typically, they're treated very well, right? It's still this company where it's still printing money. And Sundar has taken the company from, at 2015, this point when it was like one going, there was questions whether it was going to be sort of follow the earlier, like the Steve Balmer Microsoft era and become like sort of stayed non-innovative company.

And second, it was just concerned that it was just going to be trounced by Facebook and mobile advertising. And neither of those things have happened. And that being said, there's clearly a much more vocal, strong contingent around the more recent case around the four employees who were fired for data security policies according to Google and labor organizing according to the employees. Right there, there's still active resistance to some of the work that the company's done with the military. Well, let me, let me interrupt you because this is what we were originally scheduled to talk about. So, you know, I've been saying on the show that there seems to be a civil war going on inside Google. Do you actually, do you think that's a fair assessment?

If not a war, there certainly seems to be a lot of skirmishing going on lately between. Yeah, it's maybe a guerrilla warfare. Okay, hold on a second. Because actually what we need to do here, help me understand this. Because one of the reasons I've had a hard time covering this is because there seems to be many different vectors here. Like, there's Me Too stuff. There's like the James D'Amour political stuff. There's the organizing workers in a labor union sort of way stuff. There's the whole not wanting to work. We'll come back to the Pentagon and AI stuff and all that stuff you wrote about

in the last week's issue. But are these all related or just multi-headed hydrant? Like, what, is there some theme running through all this? What's going on? Sorry. Yeah, I, I, I, um, first of all, I think it needs like, everyone interested in this should, so certainly read Natasha Tiku who's at the post, Washington Post now, but wrote this great story and Wired, um, envies, that sort of laid this out and a, you know, a great chronological, um, story. Um, and I think in her reporting, and I'd say it's, I agree with this, too. Like, James DeMore, if you remember, the memo in 2017 that he sent out about, um, diversity and political bias. That is sort of the ground zero for a lot of, I mean, both DeMoor and then the Trump election, right? Or set off, I think. What DeMoor's memo did was there as a faction company that felt like they're like kind of exposed to this. Like, oh, my God, there are people inside Google who think this way. And that, I think, set off just, I think, operationally, you have, whether it's sort of internal chats.

I think a lot of it happens on encrypted messaging, right? Like there was this group of employees that became activated and sort of outraged about that, and about that, and they were sort of had this network that was built in, and then Maven hits, right, or later. Is that the group of nine or the so-called group of nine or whatever? I think the group of nine is a little bit different. So I can, yeah, the group of nine, I'm happy to, the group of nine, I think, for my understanding, and thus far they've never been made public, but who is in the number, that was a group of employees, engineers who were working on what's called an air gap feature rate

to basically allow Google's cloud business to operate like AWS and Microsoft. And so AWS can provide the cloud contract for the CIA, for instance, because they have an air-gapped cloud that meets certain higher certification standards from the government. And Google at that point didn't have that. And so my understanding of that, and according to Natasha's reporting too, like this group was sort of working very quietly to oppose that and talking to senior management, Errs Haltz, who runs the infrastructure at Google and is like Google employee number eight and sort of incredibly powerful there. And they were negotiating with Errs directly. And sort of he decided to halt on that. And I think that set off when Maven became more widely known to the company and certainly outside.

That set off this sort of rolling ball that's just gotten bigger and bigger with the walkout and with Dragonfly in China. I mean, I think there are certainly employees and the contracting issue, too, about how Google treats as contractors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to circle back to all that. Sure. But specifically, so I'm thinking of your piece in last week's issue. When it comes to like Maven in this military stuff, is this, number one, maybe this is macro in the sense that this is where cloud computing is going anyway. But maybe in the specific to Google sense, you know, again, like they're sort of a mature business on a certain level with their advertising stuff.

So like they need to go to these sort of Pentagon contracts to get revenue. And look, they're not alone. I mean, the whole Jedi thing as well. Yeah, yeah. I think one way to look at this, and I think it's totally true, is that Google's trying to pivot. Sundar Pichai has put all these resources behind the cloud business, behind hardware, behind these two lines that are new lines of businesses. You know, YouTube is the third front, but YouTube is still advertising, right? So hardware and cloud computing, hardware kind of the model for hardware of a culture of a company is Apple, right? Things are done in silos, things are done secretly.

And then the model for cloud computing, I think in this case is Amazon and Microsoft, which have very different company cultures, Amazon in particular. And so that, you know, in our story that we, in the Business Week story, Meredith Whitaker, who's been one of the most outspoken, And former Google employees around ethics and AI talked about how Google was its first two decades, right? Like they cared deeply about the end user, right? And that's been Sunnara's mantra for a long time. And the end user in that case was the end user of search, right, of Android, of maps, of all these consumer tools. Us. And now with this pivot, right, exactly.

This pivot, there's the end user is enterprise, like in this case, the military or oil and gas companies. sort of enterprises that not a majority, not all Googlers, but certainly enough to be organized and be outraged about this feel that they do not want their software code and their work supporting. Okay. Like, I swear I'm going to get to that and ask you that in five different ways. But real quick, the Thanksgiving four who got fired, all the articles keep mentioning organizing, you know, sort of a.

a vague term. What specifically does that mean? Like, what were they organizing about? Was it about like the so-called TBCs, the temp vendor and contractor? What's this organizing mean? Yeah. So this is, according to Google, its official comment on this is that they've never confirmed to this 4R. And Google says that they fired four people for what they called repeated violations of their data security policies, right? So according to the four organizers, or sorry, the four engineers who said they were fired under these policies, they were active in, I believe. So primarily, and Rebecca Rivers, as sort of the first to identify herself as being fired, she said the primary search she did was going into the Google intranet called MoMA and typing in GCP, which stands for Google Cloud Platform, and then CBP. Customs and Border Protection, right? And so at that point, there was some reporting that, I actually don't know the time frame, but around the time there was some speculation that Google was going to work, had like an initial contract with CBP.

And so both Rebecca and then two of the others were involved, and there was a petition that came out from Googlers that said, we do not want the company to ever work. We want the company to come out and say, we're not working with ICE or CCP, because of ethics and because of concerns about the impact on refugees and immigrants. So it's largely political issues? Yeah, for that, they were both, they were involved in Maven protests and the Dragonfly

protests about the search engine on China in the protests from June about the company's policies with hate speech and YouTube. I guess that's the broad category would be political. I mean, according to them earlier this week, according to them, right, they are, they feel that they are doing their sort of duties as Googlers to, like, yeah, to go out and sort of report something that they find is still wrong. Right, right. They, and they quoted that from the, in their, in their blog posts that like that's in our, you know, what I may think, don't be evil, blah, blah, blah, and report stuff that you see that's evil, right? Yeah, I think, I mean, I've certainly, like, Google people will not say this on the record, but there are people I've talked to the company who kind of would say, well, like, you're working in a company, right? Like, despite Google is a very large digital advertising company, a $800 billion company.

And they're sort of like, you can't, they're basically, the logic of some people there is that, of course the company took this action, right? and it's almost like you need to be heads down and get back to work, right? I think there's there's been that sentiment and there's been that sentiment of the company for a long time, right? Like, there was sort of always a fashion that's a role its eyes at some of the, like, ethical and political debates happening. Right. Okay.

So this is the time to ask the same question in five different ways. So how much of this is Google was the, the don't be evil company, and so it attracted a certain type of, you know, I'm not, I'm not being pejorative, but let's call it an idealistic employee. And now that is not coming back to bite them is not what I want to say. But like that's, it's in the wash now because of that. How much of that is that? A fair amount. It was, it was like Facebook rate, it, it, it, as part of its recruiting pitch to the company, and we've reported on this as well, right? Like, that both companies sort of

have this broader sweeping mission statements about changing the world. And, you know, they certainly didn't come out and say, come work for a very large ad tech company, right? Right, right. It was you're working for Google, your product, your work is going to affect billions of people, which is true. And you're, and you also sort of, the perks of being a Googler is you get to have this regular, you know, like the early times there, they would sort of have the TJF, where Larry and Sergey would stand up and anyone could ask any questions.

And you got to do the 20% projects and you got to, you know, you got to wear hoodies and teachers. Think about all the sort of like standard tropes about Google and like how, what the cultural, it's set for Silicon Valley. Those things are

definitely true. And I think they also, like they, you know, to be wholly frank, they draw like incredibly intelligent people who think about problems in the world and complex problems with technology and AI and the future of AI and automation and ethics in a way that many other people don't. And they also have a culture where certainly software engineers are fields, I won't say entitled, but feel like they have the collaborators to speak out. The privilege and the freedom.

The privilege, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, that's been something where Google has, I think, built up that for a long time, very intentionally. And the question is, one way to view it would be, and now they're, like, coming down and trying to change that pretty dramatically as they've just become so big. as they're sort of turning into a more of a cloud computing business. So then, well, I mean, a counter to that would be, this isn't specific to Google. It's maybe endemic to all of Silicon Valley right now post, I don't know, the 2016 election, or, you know, you've got protests against Pentagon stuff at Microsoft, climate change, agitation at Amazon. So, and, you know, forget tech.

Maybe that's, maybe this is everybody at this point. Like, so it's maybe not just Google. It's just maybe sort of sharper there because of what you were just saying. I mean, there's, we're on the, specifically on the tech working with, with military and work working with immigration agencies. We've seen protests that, you know, there's a pretty active what happening now at GitHub and Microsoft. There's what happening in Microsoft in general around their work with. both Jedi and that in the Hall lens with the military. Their employee protest, I think smaller ones that others have reported on the Palantir,

Salesforce, Amazon. A lot of, obviously all that has happened during the under the Trump administration. And that is, if not, the primary factor, certainly like a major factor. There's stronger that's been like pretty strong work for some leaders who have been very active in like AI and ethics and tech, tech organizing, which is having much more presence here than I certainly three, five years ago. Well, you know, another way to ask the same question is, to the degree that you're willing to speculate, how much of this is maybe generational?

Because that's part of regime change, too, is you're talking about Gen Xers, 40 and 50-year-old people turning over the reins. And again, maybe this is endemic. to everybody, but how much of it is just that, I don't know, younger, more idealistic workers aren't willing to sign on for certain things. Fairly true. I wouldn't say that across the board, though. I think one thing that we've, you know, one thing that I think is really interesting to see

going forward with Google is how much of, you know, how much people that have been willing to kind of come out and be very public. I don't think it's just necessarily generational, something that the, the first thing that the four of the four organizers who were fired, two of them were transgendered, and they spoke about this specifically about how certainly like transgender people at Google feel like they are much, they're more willing to speak out because they feel like this affects them, and they're more aware of the impact of certain policies than a transgender person at Google. I don't think that's necessarily generational.

You know, I mean, we started off a conversation talking about Larry and Sergey stepping down. Yeah. Larry is actually younger than Sundar, which is strange to think when we think about it. But so it's not like there's been a generational shift at the company. Okay, well, then, okay, but maybe, all right, not generational generational, capital G, but like you said, we started off talking about sort of regime change or changing of the guard. When you look at it or when you talk to Googlers, do they feel like something has changed at the top that management is more aggressive facing off against them or the workers have gotten? Like, what's the mood?

P.S. Mark had to switch phones real quick. So for the remainder of this episode, if the audio sounds slightly different, that's why. I think so. I think that's bared out. I think, again, I think what I have not been able to show, and what's harder, I think, to show in reporting is proportionality, right? Like, how many of their, there are certainly employees that feel like, you know, this place has changed significantly. But I can't say that that's, like, an overwhelming majority or even a majority of the company, right? And there's a little bit of selection bias, right, to people that are willing.

to sort of criticize and talk out. Certainly the ones that be able to kind of shape how they, that perception. That makes sense. But that being said, certainly like you've seen, we've done a little bit of reporting of this

on a couple measures, right? Like with around the Chrome extension that was launched to the company kind of explained as a way to avoid calendar spam, right? And there's certainly multiple employees that then were like, calendar spam has never been a problem with the company and just held that this

was kind of a disingenuous way to to what they feel like as track employees. I think the other part of this has been that there is a legitimate concern about leaking, not just not, we've spent a lot of time talking here about. So the broadly like liberal political concerns of the company, but some of the more damaging leaks have come actually from the right. where there was the employee that leaked the entire video, it's a bright part of the all-hands meeting after the election, which is that was just unprecedented in Google history, right?

No one's done that kind of thing before. And then leaking, there's an employee that came out and went to Project Veritas, the sort of sham journalistic group about claiming that Google his, Google search is biased. And we've seen sort of both on the right, a lot of employees speak out about that. So I think that certainly the company and management feels much more,

I don't know much more alarmed, but equally alarmed about that behavior. And it's definitely taken steps to try to stem that. And that in many ways becoming more of a conventional company. Like you're right, imagine you don't really hear the sort of outcry at a company like Oracle because Oracle was never a company that even allowed that kind of Oracle. Oracle was never Googly, as they used to say. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So yes, I think it's my long-winded way of saying yes.