How Google Works

"What happens is that we look at things Google, or Facebook, and we see these big corporate enterprises. We don’t see the fact that there are people inside running them, and there have been hurdles. Did you know that Google almost sold to Yahoo for, like, $200,000 before they became the greatest search engine in the world? So, it’s important, I think, to get the human perspective, to read about the people running these companies, because it lightens our approach. It’s not so frustrating if you can connect to it, and it’s so much easier to connect to the human side of anything than to a large corporation that half the world is convinced is evil. It’s really just people sitting in an office trying to do the right thing, whatever the right thing is for them. That perspective and understanding, of seeing sort of how it grew and the ideologies and philosophies from the executives’ perspective from an early stage in the company until now, I think it’s very helpful. Yes. We start to see them as these governing entities, and the truth is they’re not. They’re not governments. If they want us to use their tools in a certain way, they should make better tools. Also, it’s important to know that people make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes or loopholes are a great advantage in marketing. Finding these loopholes can advantageous in a lot of ways. In a way, that’s what marketing is. It’s: How do we leverage what’s given to us to get it in front of people? How do we make sure that that content is something that they want more of? Looking at it from the human perspective, it leaves a little room for errors. I’ll give you an example. An old loophole used to be—they fixed it at some point—if you went to twitter.com/verified, if you had ever signed up for Twitter advertising, no matter whether you had used it or not, you could get to a URL that no one knew about. That URL would allow you to submit for verification. And if you had ever uploaded anything to iTunes, you would get automatically verified. Things like that. You could bulk verify too. You could put an entire Excel sheet into their system and verify it. But very few people knew about it. A similar one was, if you wanted to be verified on Facebook or Instagram, if you downloaded their Celebrity app you could submit yourself to be verified. Of course, people figure it out and then they change them. But that sort of thing."