I'm Feeling Lucky

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, Edwardsa former journalist who knows how to writecaptures the "Google Experience," the rollercoaster ride of being part of a company creating itself in a whole new universe. I'm Feeling Luckycaptures for the first time the unique, self-invented, yet profoundly important culture of the world's most transformative corporation.

Douglas Edwards was the director of consumer marketing; and brand management at Google from 1999 to 2005 and was responsible for setting the tone and direction of the company's communications with its users. Before joining Google, Edwards was the online brand group manager for the San Jose Mercury News and the Novosibirsk correspondent for the public radio program Marketplace.