The Google Years, and Bringing the Ocean to a Billion People

Somewhere in the middle of my audio career, I did my MBA at the Australian Graduate School of Management in Sydney. People love to say you don't really learn much from an MBA, especially if you've already worked in business. For me it was the opposite, it genuinely opened my eyes to parts of the business world my hardcore engineering background had never touched. And it led, indirectly, to Google.

This was 2003, 2004, and Google in Australia was tiny, less than 100 people on a single office floor. (Today it's more like 1,500 to 2,000 people across multiple offices.) I got the chance to join because they wanted someone with an engineering background and an MBA, and I suspect it helped that I was American and understood the U.S. corporate culture. Moving into Google at that moment was a total shift for me, a completely different, much smaller company with a completely different culture.

I wasn't working on search, the core of the company. I was drawn to all the emerging technology spinning out of Google and the companies it was acquiring. I worked directly with the founders of Google Maps on a number of Maps products. Google had just acquired YouTube, so I met the YouTube people early and helped bring the product to Asia Pacific, we launched YouTube in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, and other countries around the region. That was more than tech; it was building community in the very early days of online video.

Because of my hardware background, I also got pulled into the Android project. I helped bring the first hardware devices to market, and I have a fun claim to fame: I was the first person to publicly show the Android evaluation kit, the emulator that everyone built their first apps on, working with Andy Rubin and the Android team back then. It was an incredible time to be near so much emerging technology at once.

But the project I'm proudest of from that era is the one that took over my heart: taking Street View underwater.

The idea was simple to say and brutally hard to do. Street View gives you panoramic imagery of streets. I wanted to take that same 360-degree capability down to the coral reefs of the world, so that anyone could see these astonishing underwater ecosystems. Fewer than one percent of people on Earth have ever gone scuba diving or snorkeling, most people will never lay eyes on a living reef. I wanted to bring that world to them. I ended up with a patent for the technology to make it happen.

It was intensely hardware-driven. We built a camera apparatus that could capture Street View, style 360 imagery, mounted on what was essentially a big underwater scooter, a diver propulsion vehicle that a scuba diver holds onto while it pushes them through the water, cameras on the front. GPS bounces off the ocean surface, so we had to tow a float on the surface carrying a GPS transponder, tugged along above the diver as we moved. We even worked with the legendary underwater cinematographers Ron and Valerie Taylor, the people famous for shooting the underwater footage for Jaws, who helped us design the hardware.

The project failed two or three times. I just kept going, kept going, kept going, until we found a way to make it work. We did the launch imagery off Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The launch image, three sea turtles over a beautiful coral reef, has since become the most-seen underwater image in the world, viewed by over a billion unique people. Not a billion views; a billion separate people.

That's the kind of thing hardware, and relentlessness, can make possible. Looking back, the most rewarding moments of my career have all had this same shape: hold onto a vision, refuse to let a few failures end it, actually make it real, and then watch the good that comes out of it. A billion people who will never dive a reef have now seen one. That's what keeps me building.