"The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves." That's just one of the wide-eyed reactions to Valley work culture in a deleted blog post by Irish Sunday Times columnist Sarah Carey. Carey, who lives in the rural town of Enfield, briefly moved to Palo Alto and served as "strategist to the CEO" for Cuil's Irish-born founder Tom Costello. As her fellow journalists, we've protected Cahey's right to free speech by un-unpublishing her entire post below.

GUBU

An Irish woman’s social, political and domestic commentary
17.06.08
Life in the Valley

Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 5:10 pm

Note: one of the ones that I had to let a few days pass before I could post it as I didn’t really like parts of it - especially the end - it seemed twee. Jet lag is the excuse. Still, already a couple of people said they enjoyed and emailed me. So for the record..here it goes…

I have a secret life. You may know me as a domesticated, rural housewife and while this is true, for the past year I have also tasted the life of an international software executive.
Last summer an old friend from college rang me from Palo Alto in California. He was starting a software company and wanted me to do some work for him. I tried refusing but he wasn’t going to be put off. “How long does it take to write a column?” he demanded. “Er, a day,” I replied. “And what you are doing the rest of the time? The boys are in a crèche aren’t they?”
“Well, only part time,” I defended, “and I have the house to manage. And the garden. I’m really very busy.” “Yes, very busy Sarah.”
A contract arrived which informed me I had just been appointed as a “Strategist to the CEO” of a fledgling company. That means I help him plot stuff, as he says himself. Fortunately, this plotting requires my presence in sunny California from time to time and on each trip I am amazed at the number of other Irish technology people I meet on their way to “the Valley”.

Silicon Valley is the name given to the southern suburbs of San Francisco that run about 150 miles down to the quiet town of Almaden where IBM has its research centre. At its heart lies Stanford University in Palo Alto, surrounded by the offices of many of the world’s greatest technology companies. It’s the undisputed global capital of high-tech. How did this happen?

Everyone’s got a theory. Some say that the DNA of Californians is embedded with the adventurous spirit of the first settlers here - the ones who followed the Gold Rush. John Markoff, a New York Times journalist, has argued in his book What the Dormouse Said that the mind-expanding virtues of drugs helped too. In California in the 1960s, hippies + acid = flower power. PhD graduate hippies from Stanford + acid = modern-day computing. Stanford graduates such as Messrs Hewlett and Packard set up here in the 1950s and within twenty years Xerox were inventing many of the technologies we use in every day computing.

Throw in the Venture Capital industry and soon the Valley filled with enormously rich geeks.

Irish people pop up everywhere in this unlikely environment. On the flight out, engineers and middle-ranking executives sit at the back of the plane while up the front there are the likes of Niall O’Connor from Limerick, the chief information Officer of Apple.

Other leading lights are John Harnett, also from Limerick,at Palm; Tony Redmond the chief technology officer at Intel, Brian FitzGerald at Intuit and Conrad Burke of Innovalight, a solar-energy start-up. The Irish have a history of emigration but from the mid-1980’s we started to churn computer engineers instead of civil engineers out of our universities. That’s when we stopped building skyscrapers and tunnels and started building semi-conductors and cutting edge software.

With all those stock options, Silicon Valley is a rich place. I stay in a hotel in Palo Alto and walk around to the office each morning, slowly adjusting to the fact that I am supposed to smile and greet fellow pedestrians and joggers. The tree-lined streets are perfumed with flowers and weirdly quiet. They have so much space here that buildings are low rise, mostly only two-storey and the noise of their huge cars is lost into the atmosphere.

The serenity is catching – I become conscious of my foot fall. People speak quietly, even the children. It’s beautiful, but surreal. You can’t help wondering if all the loud, crazy people have been rounded up and shipped into San Francisco.

The signs of an ailing economy are evident though. When I pop over to the Stanford Shopping Centre, there’s hardly anyone there. Hardly any staff either.

Hilary Keane works for Enterprise Ireland in their Palo Alto office, helping Irish software start-ups work on their pitches to the venture capitalists. She lives in the city and commutes to the Valley each morning. She pays $75 a week now to fill her 2 litre car, the smallest she could buy when she moved out here. Before you didn’t notice the price and now you do.

The result is that like in Ireland people are getting cautious though due to the software billions, this part of the US is suffering least.

In our little company there are about 25 staff, over a dozen of whom have PhDs. Attracted to Stanford from all over the world, these are some of the smartest people on the planet. Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area.

The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves.

When I observed this behaviour first I was appalled and took my CEO friend aside. This was disastrous! His company would never succeed if he wasted money like this and didn’t crack the whip. He laughed. This is the way it works out here. You have to be nice to people.

Well if that was the case, he could be nice to me. I wasn’t going to fly home in the back of the plane. I summoned up the audacity to ask for business class travel and was granted it without hesitation. Knowing the cost of the ticket was over €2000, which is about $5 million given the current exchange rate, I had to walk around for 15 minutes afterwards chanting “I’m worth it. I’m worth it. I’m worth it”.

But am I worth it? What on earth was I expected to do amongst these doctorates and luminaries. Within minutes of my arrival it all becomes clear. They may know something about computers, but I know a thing or two about people. All the fancy programming in the world won’t convince people to use their product and they need me to figure out how to tell people what they do. I am a devotee of the Internet and email but nothing can replace coming out here and looking them in the eye. When you’re in the same room as someone, one look can explain far more than a phone call or email.

Officially then my job is to develop a communications strategy which simply means working out how to talk to people.

I’ve got a PhD in talking alright, and I appear to have talked my way into the American Dream. For the moment it is still a dream though. Then I tap my shoes and wake up back in Enfield. I have the best of both worlds. Theirs is good, but I confess, I’m glad I live in this one.

Instead, read them aloud: This is the sound of two industry insiders observing the dreary results of the canned, controlled and scheduled "news" crafted by Valley publicists and parroted by self-styled "reporters" whose sole metric of success is pushing the Publish button first. All Lacy and Scoble needed was one morning on the outside. Yes, you two, this is how it looks to your readers every single day.

More precisely, Wal-Mart family money. Madrone Capital Partners, which manages venture-capital investments for the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, led Cuil's most recent $25 million financing round in April. Madrone's Greg Penner, who married Carrie Walton, Sam Walton's granddaughter, is on Cuil's board. And on Wal-Mart's.

Penner, who lives in Atherton, has ensconced himself in Silicon Valley society, despite an atypical background for the liberal Bay Area: His parents are evangelical sex therapists who believe in counseling gays into heterosexuality. He is a protege of Stanford Business School's Jack McDonald, and served as an executive at Walmart.com, a short-lived dotcom spinoff of Wal-Mart backed by Accel Partners and later folded back into the retailing giant.

Most significantly, he's also a board member of Baidu, a Chinese search engine which is eating Google's lunch in that country. The Waltons' investment in Cuil could be written off as simply an attempt to make money. But with Penner involved in two prominent Google's rivals, it's hard not to wonder if the Bentonville gang isn't hoping to do more than just add to its pile.

1. No advance training of the media. Companies often give select reporters early access to a new site, and give them a few days to play with it. They answer questions and guide reviewers toward flattering examples. Some also develop concise, step-by-step reviewer's guides. I used to throw those away, until I encountered an Apple guide to iLife that told me important things about the new version that I'd never have figured out on my own. Cuil did what's called a "pre-briefing" with an impressive roster of writers, but "didn’t allow anyone to actually test the search engine before the launch," according to TechCrunch. Result: No one had any really good Cuil searches to talk about.

2. "Cuil is the Gaelic word for knowledge." No, it's not. It means a corner or recess, or the back part of something. It's not even a word by itself. The Gaelic cùl with an added i becomes the genitive case. Cùil needs to go with another word, as in the town name Cùil Raithin, or "Ferry Corner." Further undermining the story: Cuil had two l's in its name a week ago. See the logo above, forwarded by a trusted tipster who got a preview. Result: The real geeks — people who look stuff up in hardbound books and are fussy about factual accuracy — have set the bozo bit on anything the company says.

3. All talk, no rock. Cuil had a pitch no one could ignore: Three times as many Web pages as Google! But Cuil's search results don't support the claim. They should have listed 25 — no, let's make it 101 searches for which Cuil beats Google's first page. Instead, the battle of Cuil versus Google was fought at the phony press-release level. Cuil founders said they had 120 billion pages. Google publicists, alerted to the competitor's plans, claimed 1 trillion URLs the Friday before Cuil's launch. Result: Devoted Google users read about Cuil, but didn't come away with a compelling reason to give it a chance.

Tom Costello, our founder and CEO, comes from Ireland, a country with a rich mythology around the quest for wisdom. Cuil is the Gaelic word for both knowledge and hazel, and features prominently in ancient legend. One famous story tells of a salmon that ate nine hazelnuts that had fallen into the Fountain of Wisdom and thereby gained all the knowledge in the world. Whoever ate the salmon would acquire this knowledge.

A famous poet fished for many years on the River Boyne hoping to catch the Salmon of Knowledge. When he finally caught it, he gave it to his young apprentice Finn McCuil to prepare, warning him not to eat any. As Finn cooked the salmon he burnt his thumb and instinctively sucked it to ease the pain. And so it was Finn and not the poet who gained all the wisdom of the world. Finn went on to become one of the great heroes of Irish folklore. Any time he needed to know the answer to a question, he sucked his thumb.

As a child Tom poached salmon from the same spot on the Boyne where it is said the Salmon of Knowledge was caught.

Slate staffer Chris Wilson's plea:

Slate wants your suggestions on the most useful queries that, when given to a variety of search engines, neatly show the differences between them. To borrow an example from my review of Powerset, the phrase "Who shot John Lennon?" demonstrates the semantic search engine's ability to answer simple questions better than Google; more conventional queries usually favor the incumbent. Or, to take another approach, perhaps a given keyword returns pages on one search engine that another refuses to crawl altogether.

When you send us your search queries, make sure to include your thoughts on what the results reveal about Google, Cuil, Ask, etc. Different engines prioritize results in different ways, based on notions of a page's authority, usefulness, or popularity. Like dictionaries, does this make some search engines descriptive and others prescriptive? Or are those terms out of date? If so, send us some new ones.

• cul, n. As noted, French for bottom. Porny philosopher Georges Bataille was a fan.
• cull, n. To choose, select, or pick. Fitting, but, no.
• cuill, n. The company's former name, an old spelling left on the company's own launch press release Sunday
• cool, n. How we're supposed to pronounce it. The parked domain features one of the most charmingly random collection of search terms.
• culi.com, n. Benvenuti! from this Italian porn site.

(Photo via Kiki de Montparnasse)