By the summer of 2001, Google had a great product, sixty million searches a day, and a problem that no algorithm could solve: it was being run by two twenty-something PhD students who had never managed a company — and their investors were losing sleep over it. The fix had a name that Larry Page and Sergey Brin came to dread. The venture capitalists called it adult supervision.
The Price of the Money
Rewind to June 1999. Google was still a scrappy startup, and it landed one of the most storied funding rounds in Silicon Valley history: $25 million, split between two rival powerhouses who almost never shared a deal. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital both wanted in badly enough to sit at the same table. For Page and Brin, having the Valley's two sharpest investors bless their company was a coup.
But the money came with a string attached, and it was a thick one. Doerr and Moritz wanted a seasoned chief executive brought in over the founders — someone who had actually run a business, met a payroll at scale, and could talk to Wall Street without flinching. Page and Brin, who trusted engineers and distrusted almost everyone else, heard this as an insult. They had built the best search engine on earth in a dorm and a garage. Why did they need a babysitter?
For more than a year, they simply stalled. Doerr later admitted he came close to regretting the investment. The founders were brilliant, but they were also convinced they could learn management the way they learned everything else — by reasoning from first principles. The board disagreed, and the standoff quietly threatened to blow up one of the best deals either firm had ever made.
The Only Acceptable Boss Was Steve Jobs
To break the deadlock, Doerr made the founders a deal of his own: go meet some real CEOs. So Page and Brin did — and proceeded to reject nearly everyone they interviewed. The candidates were too corporate, too slow, too unfamiliar with the guts of the technology. When Doerr pressed them on who, exactly, they would accept, the pair gave an answer that was equal parts ambition and trolling: the only person qualified to run Google was Steve Jobs.
Jobs was, of course, busy running Apple. But the exercise revealed what the founders actually cared about: they wanted a boss who was a genuine technologist, not a suit who had been handed a company. That narrowed the field dramatically — and it pointed straight at Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt was not an obvious rock star. Born in 1955, he had a bachelor's from Princeton and a master's and PhD in computer science from Berkeley. As a Bell Labs intern he had co-written Lex, a tool that generations of programmers used to build compilers. He had risen to chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, then spent four grinding years as CEO of Novell, a networking company fighting a losing war against Microsoft. On paper he was a middle-aged enterprise executive. Underneath, he was exactly the kind of person Page and Brin respected: someone who could read their code and argue with them as a peer.
The interview was less a job pitch than an intellectual hazing. The founders grilled Schmidt on the technical details of his own past work and picked apart his ideas. He pushed back. They liked that. It also didn't hurt that Schmidt, unlike most fifty-something executives, had been to Burning Man — a small cultural signal that he might survive Google's deliberately weird internal culture. He joined as chairman of the board in March 2001, and by August he was chief executive officer.
The Rule of Three
What made the arrangement unusual was that Schmidt didn't replace the founders — he joined them. Page became President of Products, Brin became President of Technology, and the three agreed, in effect, to run the company by consensus. Reporters and insiders started calling it the triumvirate, or the troika: a power-sharing pact in which no major decision was supposed to move unless all three were on board.
On paper, ruling a fast-growing company by committee of three should have been a recipe for gridlock. In practice, it worked for the better part of a decade because each man knew his lane. Schmidt handled the parts of the job the founders found tedious or terrifying — hiring executives, building the sales and operations machine, managing the board, and eventually facing down Wall Street. Page kept his obsessive grip on the product and the ever-rising bar for engineering. Brin drove deals, partnerships, and the restless push into new frontiers. The founders kept their vision; Schmidt kept the trains running.
It wasn't always smooth. Schmidt had walked into a company that considered process a form of moral failure, and he had to earn his authority rather than assume it — the founders retained enormous informal power, and everyone knew it. But the results were hard to argue with. Under the triumvirate, Google went from a promising search box to a global advertising juggernaut, launching Gmail, Maps, and a torrent of other products, and growing revenue into the billions. The “adult supervision” the founders had resisted so bitterly turned out to be the scaffolding that let them keep dreaming without the whole thing collapsing.
Schmidt would hold the CEO seat until 2011, when a more confident Larry Page took it back. But the most consequential test of the triumvirate was still ahead. In 2004, the three of them would try to take Google public — and they would insist on doing it in a way that made every banker on Wall Street furious.
Next time: The IPO — the Dutch auction that broke Wall Street's rules.
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