#154 - Matt Cutts

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's Podcast. Today's episode is with Matt Cutts. Matt is the Administrator of the US Digital Service, and previously, he was the Head of the Web Spam Team at Google. You can find him on Twitter, at MattCuts.
All right, here we go. Matt Cutts, welcome to the podcast.

**Matt Cutts** (0:19)
Thanks for having me.

**Craig Cannon** (0:20)
No problem. So, for those who don't know you, you are the Administrator of the US Digital Service, and previously, you were at Google, where you were the Head of the Web Spam Team, and also the 71st employee in the year 2000
What was Google like in 2000?

**Matt Cutts** (0:37)
Oh man, so we had three people start that day, and that was a new record at the time. Now, you've got hundreds of people starting each week.
But the crazy thing is, it was a startup back then. So, late nights, working crazy hours. I remember one of the first project I worked on was Safe Search.
And so, at one point at like 2 a.m. I got something working and I was really happy. So, I was gonna head home and I was like speeding because I was like super excited. I got this thing working. Got a speeding ticket. And so, I literally remember like working every weekend until at some point, people were like, oh, three or four years in, we don't work on weekends anymore. And I was like, oh, now the culture's changed a little bit. But it's super weird to be like the people who were just folks, you know, Amit or Lucas or whoever, then eventually became entire departments, you know, sales departments and people who dealt with logs and privacy and, but it, back then, it was just like a small group of people.

**Craig Cannon** (1:36)
That's crazy. How do you, because I know the story with PB creating Gmail is just like a one guy goof.
Let's see if we can do this. How did projects get delegated and chosen? How did it all work?

**Matt Cutts** (1:50)
Well, it was funny because I started out, I did SafeSearch and then there was this ski offsite. Everybody fit on one bus, one 50 person bus back then.
So that was a great introduction to the company. And I was skiing and on a lift with a manager and she was like, hey Matt, you like doing front end programming. And I was like, sure, I like front end programming. And then like, boom, guess what? You're in the ads group now. I'm like, wait, I don't wanna be in the ads group, but there were only like five people and they needed to help. And so I was like trying to help out. We did like geolocation and it took like a year to claw my way back towards ranking. So it was very informal. It was very much like, here's a problem. We gotta go swarm and tackle it.
Even writing SafeSearch was because there was a partner that wanted it. And so we're like, okay, can we build this in time? Let's see if we can make it.

**Craig Cannon** (2:39)
So on like a self-hosted version or like a white, yeah, okay. To what degree did you feel like the success of Google was certain at the time?

**Matt Cutts** (2:50)
Completely uncertain. I mean, if you go back, I think Google had raised like $25 million from, you know, like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia or whatever. And so as I recall, the.com crash happened like March of 2000, winter apocalypse. Everybody was like, this is gonna be terrible.
And so it wasn't at all clear that we were gonna be able to make it. I remember when Alta Vista, I was worried they were gonna crush us.
Because you got a certain number of ranking signals and if they had twigged and caught on fast enough, they even copied our appearance. They had a little front end that you could set it where you could be, I think they called it goofy. It was rainbow colored, so it looked a little like Google. But they didn't get the quality right. So we were okay from that point of view. But it was nonstop for several years. I mean, trying to make sure that in those early days, Microsoft didn't realize how much money was coming from search engines. But also AdWords and later AdSense.

**Craig Cannon** (3:50)
But can you walk through that product development? Because I'm so curious. What did you start? You're like, think, oh, this might not be a thing. And then a certain type of ad takes off or you tried something and it failed.