Google

"key takeaway here is that the steps of market development outlined in this book structured their entire effort: •    They began with a target customer (disenfranchised citizens in developing economies who would be making their very first purchase of an Internet-enabled service) with a compelling reason to buy (access to all the content on the Web for free, plus communications for personal, family, and business purposes). •    They figured out the whole product and determined for that product that the operators and the OEM device manufacturers were the critical anchor partners. •    They then went after partners who shared their interest in the next two billion, with franchise interests in developing economies, and used their focused requests to create a big enough sales opportunity to get the attention of two world-class OEMs. •    When it came time to “create the competition” (something we will get to in the next chapter), the whole ecosystem knew it was Apple and Google, two extremely powerful ecosystems"

"Larry was always good about upping the goals for the company OKRs. He used certain phrases that stuck with me. He wanted people at Google to be “uncomfortably excited.” He wanted us to have “a healthy disregard for the impossible.” I tried to do the same for the products team. It took courage to write an OKR that might well fail, but there was no other way if we wanted to be great. We deliberately set the bar for 20 million weekly active users by year’s end, knowing it was a formidable stretch—we were starting from zero, after all."

"Whenever we invent something new at Google, we’re always thinking: How can we scale it to a billion? Early in the process, that number can seem very abstract. But when you set a measurable objective for the year and chunk the problem, quarter by quarter, moonshots become more doable. That’s one of the great benefits of OKRs. They give us clear, quantitative targets on the road to those qualitative leaps. After we failed against the 20 million in 2008, it made us dig deeper. We never gave up on the objective, but we changed the way we framed it. Here’s what I tried to communicate: “No, we didn’t reach the goal, but we are laying the foundation to break through this barrier. Now, what are we going to do differently?” In a culture of smart people, you had better have good answers to that question; you can’t tap-dance your way through. In this case, we needed a solution to one very basic problem: Why was it so difficult to get people to try a new browser?"

"Two OKR Baskets Google divides its OKRs into two categories, committed goals and aspirational (or “stretch”) goals. It’s a distinction with a real difference. Committed objectives are tied to Google’s metrics: product releases, bookings, hiring, customers. Management sets them at the company level, employees at the departmental level. In general, these committed objectives—such as sales and revenue goals—are to be achieved in full (100 percent) within a set time frame. Aspirational objectives reflect bigger-picture, higher-risk, more future-tilting ideas. They originate from any tier and aim to mobilize the entire organization. By definition, they are challenging to achieve. Failures—at an average rate of 40 percent—are part of Google’s territory. The relative weighting of these two baskets is a cultural question. It will vary from one organization to the next, and from quarter to quarter. Leaders must ask themselves: What type of company do we need to be in the coming year? Agile and daring, to crack a new market—or more conservative and operational, to firm up our existing position? Are we in survival mode, or is there cash on hand to bet big for a big reward? What does our business require, right now?"

"Google has had its share of colossal misfires, from Helpouts to Google Answers. Living in the 70 percent zone entails a liberal sprinkling of moonshots and a willingness to court failure."

"On state-of-the-art goal management platforms, OKR scores are system-generated; the numbers are objective, untouched by human hands. (With less automated, homegrown platforms, users may need to perform their own calculations.) The simplest, cleanest way to score an objective is by averaging the percentage completion rates of its associated key results. Google uses a scale of 0 to 1.0: 0.7 to 1.0 = green.* (We delivered.) 0.4 to 0.6 = yellow. (We made progress, but fell short of completion.) 0.0 to 0.3 = red. (We failed to make real progress.)"

"During Gmail’s development, Google’s leaders considered offering 100MB of storage—an enormous upgrade. But by 2004, when the product was released to the public, the 100MB goal was dead and forgotten. Instead, Gmail provided a full gigabyte of storage, up to five hundred times more than the competition. Users could keep emails in perpetuity. Digital communication changed forever. That, my friends, is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Gmail didn’t merely improve on existing systems. It reinvented the category and forced competitors to raise their game by orders of magnitude. Such 10x thinking is rare in any sector, on any stage. Most people, Larry Page observes, “tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible.”"

"the frequency of team check-ins varies with the business needs of the moment, the gap between predicted outcomes and execution, the quality of intragroup communication, and the group’s size and location(s). The more dispersed the team’s members, the more frequently they touch base. Google’s benchmark check-in cycle is monthly, at a minimum, though goal discussions there are so pervasive that formal meetings sometimes go by the boards."

"OKR Shepherd For an OKR system to function effectively, the team deploying it—whether a group of top executives or an entire organization—must adopt it universally. No exceptions, no opt-outs. Yes, there will be late adopters, resisters, and garden-variety procrastinators. To prod them to join the flock, a best practice is to designate one or more OKR shepherds. For years, that role in Google’s products department was filled by senior vice president Jonathan Rosenberg. Here is one of Jonathan’s classic communiqués, with the laggards’ names deleted to protect the guilty: From: Jonathan Rosenberg Date: Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 2:59 PM Subject: Amidst boundless opportunities, 13 PMs whiff on OKRs (names included) Product Gang, As most of you know, I strongly believe that having a good set of quarterly OKRs is an important part of being successful at Google. That’s why I regularly send you notes reminding you to get them done on time, and why I ask managers to review them to make sure all of our OKRs are good. I’ve tried notes that are nice and notes that are mean. Personal favorites include threatening you with Jonathan’s Pit of Despair in October 07 and celebrating near perfection in July 08. Over time I iterated this carrot/stick approach until we reached near 100% compliance. Yay! So then I stopped sending notes, and look what happened: this quarter, SEVERAL of you didn’t get your OKRs done on time, and several others didn’t grade your Q2 OKRs. It turns out it’s not the type of note I send that matters, but the fact that I send anything at all! Names of the fallen are duly noted below (with a pass given to several AdMob employees who are new to the ways of Google, and to many of you who missed the deadline but still got them done in July). We have so many great opportunities before us (search, ads, display, YouTube, Android, enterprise, local, commerce, Chrome, TV, mobile, social . . .) that if you can’t come up with OKRs that get you excited about coming to work every day, then something must be wrong. In fact, if that’s really the case, come see me. In the meantime, please do your OKRs on time, grade your previous quarter’s OKRs, do a good job at it, and post them so that the OKR link from your moma [intranet] page works. This is not administrative busywork, it’s an important way to set your priorities for the quarter and ensure that we’re all working together. Jonathan"

"When I ran OKRs for Larry, I sat in on four-hour meetings with his leadership team, where he’d debate all the company objectives and people were expected to be able to defend them and make sure they were clear. The guidance for OKRs at Google was often top-down, but with lots of discussion with experts on the team and significant give-and-take on key results: This is the direction we want to go, now tell us how you’re going to get there. Those long meetings enabled Larry to emphasize things he cared about, and also to vent frustrations, especially around service on our product OKRs. He’d say, “Tell me your speed now.” And then: “Why can’t you cut that in half?”"

"Judging from our experience at Google, I’d say that OKRs are especially useful for young companies just starting to build their culture. When you’re little, with fewer resources, it’s even more vital to be clear on where you’re going. It’s like raising kids. If you bring them up with no structure, and then you tell them as teenagers, “Okay, now here are the rules”—well, that’s going to be hard. If possible, it’s better to have rules from the start. At the same time, I’ve seen mature companies do turnarounds and change people and processes. No company is too young to adopt OKRs, and for no company is it too late."

"The qualities prized by Andy Grove—collective accountability, fearless risk taking, measurable achievement—are also highly esteemed at Google. In Project Aristotle, an internal Google study of 180 teams, standout performance correlated to affirmative responses to these five questions: Structure and clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear? Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed? Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us? Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time? Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?"

"The first item on this list—structure and clarity—is the raison d’être for objectives and key results. The others are all key facets of a healthy workplace culture, and tie directly to OKR superpowers and CFR communication tools. Consider peer-to-peer “dependability.” In a high-functioning OKR environment, transparency and alignment make people more diligent in meeting their obligations. At Google, teams assume collective responsibility for goal achievement—or for failures. At the same time, individuals are held responsible for specific key results. Peak performance is the product of collaboration and accountability."

"Stretch for Amazing At the beginning of each cycle, distinguish between goals that must be attained 100 percent (committed OKRs) and those that are stretching for a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (a BHAG, or aspirational OKR). Establish an environment where individuals are free to fail without judgment. To stimulate problem solving and spur people to greater achievement, set ambitious goals—even if it means some quarterly targets will be missed. But don’t set the bar so high that an OKR is obviously unrealistic. Morale suffers when people know they can’t succeed. To get leaps in productivity or innovation, follow Google’s “Gospel of 10x” and replace incremental OKRs with exponential ones. That’s how industries get disrupted and categories reinvented. Design stretch OKRs to fit the organization’s culture. A company’s optimal “…"

"Coach became the Coach when he traded the gridiron for an even more competitive arena, namely the boardrooms and executive suites of Silicon Valley. He was a world-class listener, a hall-of-fame mentor, and the wisest man I’ve ever met. His ambitious, caring, accountable, transparent, profane humanity built the culture at Google—and dozens of other companies—to what it is today."

"When it came to Google’s OKRs, Bill paid closest attention to the less glamorous, “committed” objectives. (A favorite piece of coaching, served with his typical dash of salt: “You’ve got to make the f—ing trains run on time.”)"

"Thus it is crucial that as Google employees and managers we make conscious, careful, and informed choices about how we allocate our time and energy—as individuals and as members of teams. OKRs are the manifestation of those careful choices, and the means by which we coordinate the actions of individuals to achieve great collective goals."

"To win recruits over, the team crafted an edgy sales pitch. Years later, Levchin described the approach to a Stanford computer science class: Engineers are very cynical people. They’re trained to be. And they can afford to be, given the large number of companies that are trying to recruit them in Silicon Valley right now. Since engineers think any new idea is dumb, they will tend to think that your new idea is dumb. They get paid a lot at Google doing some pretty cool stuff. Why stop indexing the world to go do your dumb thing? So the way to compete against the giants is not with money. Google will outbid you. They have [an] oil derrick that spits out $ 30 billion in search revenue every year. To win, you need to tell a story about cogs. At Google, you’re a cog. Whereas with me, you’re an instrumental piece of this great thing that we’ll build together. Articulate the vision. Don’t even try to pay well. Meet people’s cash flow needs. Pay them so they can cover their rent and go out every once in a while. It’s not about cash. It’s about breaking through the wall of cynicism. It’s about making 1% of this new thing way more exciting than a couple hundred grand and a cubicle at Google."

"Thiel points to this pressure as the defining characteristic of his PayPal experience. “If you’re at a fantastically successful company like Microsoft or Google,” he explained, “you will infer that starting a new business is easier than it is. You’ll learn a lot of wrong things. If you’re at the company that failed, you tend to learn the lesson that it’s impossible. At PayPal we were sort of intermediate. We weren’t as successful as some of the great successes of Silicon Valley, but I think people sort of calibrated it and learned the best lesson—that it’s hard, but doable.”"

"START WITH TRIP REPORTS For more than a decade, Eric held his weekly staff meetings on Mondays at 1 p.m. In many ways, these meetings were pretty much like any other staff meeting you might have been to. There was an agenda, check-ins with everyone around the table, people surreptitiously checking email and texts . . . all the usual stuff. Eric did one thing different from the norm, though: when everyone had come into the room and gotten settled, he’d start by asking what people did for the weekend, or, if they had just come back from a trip, he’d ask for an informal trip report. This was a staff that included Larry Page and Sergey Brin, so often the weekend report included kiteboarding tales or updates from the world of extreme fitness, but it also could skew toward the more mundane: Jonathan’s daughter’s latest soccer achievements, or engineering lead Alan Eustace’s score on the golf course.* Sometimes, if he had just returned from a business trip, Eric offered his own report, putting a Google map on the screen with pins dropped on the cities where he’d visited. He’d go city by city, talking about his trip and the interesting things he’d observed. While this conversation seemed impromptu and informal at first glance, it was a part of a communications approach that Bill had developed over the years and improved in collaboration with Eric. The objectives were twofold. First, for team members to get to know each other as people, with families and interesting lives outside of work. And second, to get everyone involved in the meeting from the outset in a fun way, as Googlers and human beings, and not just as experts and owners of their particular roles. Bill and Eric understood that there’s a direct correlation between fun work environments and higher performance, with conversation about family and fun (what academics might call “socioemotional communication”) being an easy way to achieve the former. Later in the meeting, when business decisions were being discussed, Eric wanted everyone to weigh in, regardless of whether the issue touched on their functional area or not. The simple communications practice—getting people to share stories, to be personal with each other—was in fact a tactic to ensure better decision making and camaraderie. “At first I thought it was really weird,” Dick Costolo says of the trip report practice, which he also learned from Bill. “But when I started doing it and seeing it in practice, wow, it really makes a difference. The whole dynamic of the meeting changes, you get more empathy, a better mood.” Dick tells the story of how he attended the staff meeting of a CEO he was mentoring, and the meeting started with hot topics and issues—no social talk whatsoever. “It really hit me in the face how jarring that was. I couldn’t tell how well the team worked together and connected.”"

"When we were working on this book and Eric talked about his meetings with Bill, Jonathan had to intervene. That was not how Bill started 1:1s, Jonathan reminded Eric. While Bill did have his top-five list of things to discuss, he didn’t write them on the whiteboard for all to see. Rather, he would hold them back, like a poker player holding his cards close to the vest. After talking about family and other nonwork stuff, Bill would ask Jonathan what his top five items were. Jonathan came to realize that this approach was Bill’s way of seeing how Jonathan was prioritizing his time and effort. If Bill led off with his list, Jonathan simply could have agreed with it. The discussion of the list was in itself a form of coaching (apparently one that Eric never needed). In teaching his management seminar at Google, Bill advocated that each person should put his or her list…"

"FIVE WORDS ON A WHITEBOARD Our one-on-one meetings with Bill were always held at his nondescript office off California Avenue, Palo Alto’s quieter commercial district a mile or so south of the glitzier University Avenue. This felt like a waste of time at first—why couldn’t he come to Google?—but we quickly realized it was the right location. After all, when you go see your therapist, you go see your therapist. When making the pilgrimage to Bill, you’d enter through an unmarked door, go up the stairs to the second floor, down a hallway, give Debbie Brookfield, his longtime assistant, a hug, then go into the conference room to wait for him. For Eric’s meetings, there were always five words written on the whiteboard, indicating the topics to discuss that day. The words might be about a person, a product, an operational issue, or an upcoming meeting. That’s how they organized their talk."

"In our experience, aberrant geniuses can be enormously valuable and productive. They can build great products and high-performing teams. They have quick insights. They are simply better in many, many ways. And they can have both the ego and the fragility to match their outsized talent and performance. They often put a lot of energy into personal gains at the expense of peer relationships. A me-first attitude sometimes creeps through (or barges in), which can cause resentment in others and affect their performance. Here is where the art of balance comes in: there is aberrant behavior, and there is aberrant behavior. How much do you tolerate, and when is it too much? Where is that elusive boundary? Never put up with people who cross ethical lines: lying, lapses of integrity or ethics, harassing or mistreating colleagues. In a way, these are the easier cases, since the decision is so clear-cut. The harder cases are the ones where the person doesn’t cross these lines. How do you determine when the damage a person causes exceeds their considerable contributions? There’s no perfect answer to this, but there are a few warning signs. All of these are coachable, but if there’s no change, they shouldn’t be tolerated. Does the aberrant genius break team communications? Does he interrupt others, or attack or rebuke them? Does he make people afraid to talk? Does the aberrant genius suck up too much management time? It’s hard to know when an aberrant genius’s behavior has become too toxic for the team to bear, but if you are spending hours upon hours controlling the damage, that’s a good sign it’s gone too far. A lot of that time is usually spent arguing with the person, which is rarely constructive. One time Bill was coaching a Google manager about an aberrant genius on the team, and he summed up the situation neatly. “I don’t know why I’m defending him,” Bill noted, “except that his brilliance is one of the things that makes us great. How can we capture the good and dismiss the bad? You can’t be with him eighteen hours a day!” The eighteen-hours-a-day comment was an overstatement, but not a huge one; the person was requiring an inordinate amount of management damage control. He eventually left the company.*"

"ONLY COACH THE COACHABLE On a January day in 2002, Jonathan drove over to the Google office in Mountain View, where he thought he was going to pick up a formal job offer to become head of the growing Google product team. He thought the job was a lock, but once he arrived, he was escorted to a plain conference room where a gruff, older guy greeted him. It was the first time Jonathan met Bill. He couldn’t quite remember who Bill was, and did not realize, at least at first, that this guy was the final gateway on the road to employment at the company. No problem, thought Jonathan, I’m a pretty big deal, SVP from a successful tech company, @Home. I got this! Bill looked at Jonathan for what seemed like minutes, then told him that he had spoken with a few of the principals from @Home: its cofounder Tom Jermoluk; its first CEO, William Randolph Hearst III; and one of its investors, John Doerr, who was also on Google’s board. The consensus, Bill reported, was that Jonathan was smart and worked hard. Jonathan’s chest puffed a bit. “But I don’t care about any of that,” Bill said. “I only have one question: Are you coachable?” Jonathan instantly, and regrettably, replied: “It depends on the coach.” Wrong answer. “Smart alecks are not coachable,” Bill snapped. He stood up to leave, interview over, as it dawned on Jonathan that he had heard Eric Schmidt was getting coaching from someone and, oh my God, this must be the guy. Jonathan switched from smart-aleck mode to groveling mode, backing away from his quip (which wasn’t exactly a quip), and asked Bill to continue the conversation. After another moment that felt like minutes, Bill sat back down and talked about how he chose the people he was going to work with based on humility. Leadership is not about you, it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team. Bill believed that good leaders grow over time, that leadership accrues to them from their teams. He thought people who were curious and wanted to learn new things were best suited for this. There was no room in this formula for smart alecks and their hubris. Bill then asked, “What do you want to get out of a coach?” This felt like, and indeed was, a change-your-life-forever moment. And Jonathan couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally and fortunately, in what football fans might call a Hail Mary play, he remembered a quote from Tom Landry, who coached the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys for twenty-nine years, a stint that included twenty straight winning seasons and two Super Bowl titles. “A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.” That’s what I want, Jonathan told Bill. It worked. Jonathan not only got the job, he got the coach he didn’t think he needed, but sorely did."

"The traits of coachability Bill sought were honesty and humility, the willingness to persevere and work hard, and a constant openness to learning. Honesty and humility because a successful coaching relationship requires a high degree of vulnerability, much more than is typical in a business relationship. Coaches need to learn how self-aware a coachee is; they need to not only understand the coachee’s strengths and weaknesses, but also understand how well the coachee understands his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Where are they honest with themselves, and where are their blind spots? And then it is the coach’s job to raise that self-awareness further and to help them see the flaws they don’t see for themselves. People don’t like to talk about these flaws, which is why honesty and humility are so important. If people can’t be honest with themselves and their coach, and if they aren’t humble enough to recognize how they aren’t perfect, they won’t get far in that relationship. Humility, because Bill believed that leadership is about service to something that is bigger than you: your company, your team. Today the concept of “servant leadership” is in vogue and has been directly linked to stronger company performance.*5 Bill believed and practiced it well before it became popular. The coachable people are the ones who can see that they are part of something bigger than themselves. You can have a considerable ego and still be part of an even bigger cause. This is one reason Bill threw himself into coaching people at Google. He foresaw that the company had the potential to have a big impact in the world, to indeed be far bigger in every way than any of its individual execs."

"In 2011, Eric stepped down as Google CEO. In the ensuing reorganization, Jonathan’s job as head of products was eliminated. He was considering a few options, including running the Enterprise business (now Google Cloud, a multibillion-dollar division), but decided to decline them all. He felt hurt by the reorg and considered these other jobs a demotion. Bill was so disappointed; Jonathan was putting his bruised ego ahead of what was best for the Google team (and, in fact, himself). He was making a “mistake born of ego and emotion,” and Bill thought Jonathan maybe should consider removing his head from his ass. Bill suggested that Jonathan take more time to consider his decision, and he continued to meet with him on a regular basis. With Bill’s help, Jonathan later found his way back into the Google fold by taking on…"

"The benefits of owning a brand are entirely connected to longevity — something which is true even of “new” brands such as Google. A brand provides an organisation with its heritable characteristics, with a trust that survives beyond an individual transaction. That trust hangs on consistency. It is also through consistency that brands become truly eloquent, by a kind of power of distillation — rather as, when you are in a long-term relationship, you can leave a great deal unsaid. This brand shorthand (Steve Hayden describes a brand as the most effective form of data compression in existence) should give long lived brands a considerable advantage over competitors. Twenty years ago it did."

"The street finds its own uses for things, as someone once said. And isn’t it interesting how many successful brands eschew user imagery. easyJet works hard to deposition itself — to be socially neutral. Apple uses dead people or silhouettes. BMW for years had a rule that no people could be shown in its ads (an especially wise move as not even BMW drivers like other BMW drivers — or anyone else for that matter; note to BMW … don’t try starting a social network). Is Red Bull an energy drink or a mixer? What is the user-imagery of Amazon? Who is the typical Google user? What makes Google better? The fact that we cannot answer these questions simply would typically be considered a flaw."

"The value of Twitter comes when you are overheard. To understand what I mean by this, consider how the telephone network worked in the small Welsh town where my father lived in the 1950s. A typical call ran as follows: “Oh, hello Mrs X, could you put me through to Newport station, please?” Mrs X (the operator) would then connect you to the station and you would ask for and be given the times of the following day’s trains to Bristol. So far, normal enough. But 30 seconds after you had hung up, the telephone would ring: “It’s Mrs X here from the exchange. If you want to get to Bristol, I remember hearing Mr Shaw saying he was driving down tomorrow morning, so maybe you could ring and ask him for a lift?” Now I suppose being connected to this telephone exchange was pretty hopeless if you wanted to have an extramarital affair or run an international drugs cartel. But sometimes, as in this example, it was very useful. The same goes for Twitter. Collective knowledge is valuable. Mention that you are thinking of having a curry in Oxford and in minutes someone will come up with a recommendation (Spice Valley or Saffron, apparently). For this reason, some very clever people believe that the threat to Google, when it comes, will come from a collective social brain like this."

"To win recruits over, the team crafted an edgy sales pitch. Years later, Levchin described the approach to a Stanford computer science class: Engineers are very cynical people. They’re trained to be. And they can afford to be, given the large number of companies that are trying to recruit them in Silicon Valley right now. Since engineers think any new idea is dumb, they will tend to think that your new idea is dumb. They get paid a lot at Google doing some pretty cool stuff. Why stop indexing the world to go do your dumb thing? So the way to compete against the giants is not with money. Google will outbid you. They have [an] oil derrick that spits out $30 billion in search revenue every year. To win, you need to tell a story about cogs. At Google, you’re a cog. Whereas with me, you’re an instrumental piece of this great thing that we’ll build together. Articulate the vision. Don’t even try to pay well. Meet people’s cash flow needs. Pay them so they can cover their rent and go out every once in a while. It’s not about cash. It’s about breaking through the wall of cynicism. It’s about making 1% of this new thing way more exciting than a couple hundred grand and a cubicle at Google."

"Thiel points to this pressure as the defining characteristic of his PayPal experience. “If you’re at a fantastically successful company like Microsoft or Google,” he explained, “you will infer that starting a new business is easier than it is. You’ll learn a lot of wrong things. If you’re at the company that failed, you tend to learn the lesson that it’s impossible. At PayPal we were sort of intermediate. We weren’t as successful as some of the great successes of Silicon Valley, but I think people sort of calibrated it and learned the best lesson—that it’s hard, but doable.”"

"the companies we highlight survived the peaks and valleys of business realities, and most thrived. With iterations of both failure and success, they developed the most advanced business systems on the planet. The very best defied the odds and became exceptional. The truth is that their secrets are hardly secrets at all—continuous improvement, rigorous benchmarking, disciplined investment, principled leadership, solid business systems—but these practices have been long forgotten, ignored, or dismissed by the businesspeople hypnotized by the Google-Amazon-Apple dream."

"Industries exhibiting Network Economies often exhibit these attributes: Winner take all. Businesses with strong Network Economies are frequently characterized by a tipping point: once a single firm achieves a certain degree of leadership, then the other firms just throw in the towel. Game over—the P&L of a challenge would just be too ugly. For example, even a company as competent and with as deep pockets as Google could not unseat Facebook with Google+. Boundedness. As powerful as this Barrier is, it is bounded by the character of the network, something well-demonstrated by the continued success of both Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook has powerful Network Economies itself but these have to do with personal not professional interactions. The boundaries of the network effects determine the boundaries of the business. Decisive early product. Due to tipping point dynamics, early relative scaling is critical in developing Power. Who scales the fastest is often determined by who gets the product most right early on. Facebook’s trumping of MySpace is a good example."

"As the quality debate raged, Balsillie turned his attention to another dilemma: how to protect and build RIM’s nondevice revenues. RIM’s supremacy in wireless e-mail had left carriers beholden to paying for access to its complex data traffic system. RIM increasingly relied on those fees; they accounted for $2.2 billion of revenue, or 14 percent of the total, in the year ended February 27, 2010. But because the fees had significantly higher profit margins than handsets, they accounted for most of the company’s $2.5 billion net income. That left RIM in an awkward position against Apple and Google. Apple made money selling songs, movies, e-books, and apps to iPhone customers—content that consumers willingly bought. Google wanted Android on as many smartphones as possible to increase the reach of its powerful and popular advertising-supported search service. RIM’s dominant source of extra revenue, by contrast, was fees extracted from reluctant carriers, who despised paying them."

"The regulatory move thwarted Apple as it expanded into entertainment and services, which made it more like a Google or a Facebook. Bloomberg noted that Apple had been “allowed to grow almost unimpeded in China” in the previous decade, but now it looked like Beijing wanted to tilt the field in favor of domestic companies."

"You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing)."

"Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige? Here are some bad answers: “Your stock options will be worth more here than elsewhere.” “You’ll get to work with the smartest people in the world.” “You can help solve the world’s most challenging problems.” What’s wrong with valuable stock, smart people, or pressing problems? Nothing—but every company makes these same claims, so they won’t help you stand out. General and undifferentiated pitches don’t say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others."

"Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige? Here are some bad answers: “Your stock options will be worth more here than elsewhere.” “You’ll get to work with the smartest people in the world.” “You can help solve the world’s most challenging problems.” What’s wrong with valuable stock, smart people, or pressing problems? Nothing—but every company makes these same claims, so they won’t help you stand out.…"

"To understand the scale of this variance, consider another of Google’s computer-for-human substitution projects. In 2012, one of their supercomputers made headlines when, after scanning 10 million thumbnails of YouTube videos, it learned to identify a cat with 75% accuracy. That seems impressive—until you remember that an average four-year-old can do it flawlessly. When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks but even a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can’t beat a child at others, you can tell that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other—they’re categorically different."

"Just cover the basics like health insurance and then promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people. You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team."

"Larry Page, the creator of Google, said that we should "never be intimidated by the impossible". Therefore, we should be careful not to prematurely classify a goal or a heartfelt wish as "impossible". Because once we have done that, a dangerous automatism begins: We start to gather all those reasons that can prove why it can't be done."

"As the excitement over high-speed modems made headlines, I got a call in December 1994 from John Doerr, a Silicon Valley investor at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, renowned for his Midas touch with start-ups in the computer industry. He backed Compaq, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and later, Amazon and Google."

"Leonardo also disagrees with some of Andrea's strategic choices. For example, he doesn't like the glasses developed with Google at all, which will turn out to be a flop. Aesthetically, they do not look like a pair of normal glasses at all: at the beginning, they do not even have lenses. The frame only serves to carry a mini-display in front of the right eye."

"That wasn’t the only thing Google manhandled us out of. We bought Ask.com for $1.8 billion because we thought its search interface far superior to theirs. It was the first to get away from showing ten blue links and was innovating with what it called “smart answers” to search queries. What we didn’t factor in was that Google could simply copy all our innovations and push us into irrelevance. We still own Ask.com. It’s a bit of a lemon, but for almost twenty years we’ve been able to squeeze enough profits out of it to get us way past breakeven on the original purchase price. As usual for me, we made our mistakes early and course-corrected from there."

"During the 1990s and early 2000s, I hopscotched my way across every internet opportunity, not that we didn’t plow money into some glorious dead ends. We put hundreds of millions of dollars into Citysearch, believing it was a great organizing principle for local businesses to have a web page that connected them to internet users. It was, but it was also an impossibly hard slog at a time when not enough people were online to support it. We struggled for years until Google’s monopoly tossed Citysearch into the dustheap of online history."

"“Fifteen years ago, 50% of internet users were Americans. Asians were 19%. However, five years from now, Americans will be 12% of the internet population, and Asians will be 50%. (ellipsis) Until now, you could not become the number one internet company without being an American company. Companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo US, and eBay—all American companies. In other words, if 50% of users were American, naturally, it would evolve into an English website with a business model suited to American lifestyles. So, Americans had the advantage of location. But from now on, Asians will become 50% of the internet population. In just five years. Already, Chinese internet users have surpassed Americans. 50% will be centered on China and Asia, with Americans becoming 12%. In this sense, we precisely gained the advantage of location. If we obtain the opportuneness of Heaven and the advantage of location, we must act.”"

"“Fifteen years ago, Americans comprised 50% of the internet population. Asians made up 19% back then. (Omitted) Until now, only American companies could be number one on the internet. Google, Amazon, Yahoo US, eBay, etc., all those were American companies, right? Since 50% of the customers, the users, were Americans, naturally, the website would be in English, with a business model suited to American lifestyles. Hence, Americans had the advantage of the land.”"

"However, in November 2010, the last event, his health was not in good shape, and he left the table after only sipping miso soup. In any case, the board dinner was held at Keizuki for five consecutive years. Apple’s board of directors in 2006 included a distinguished lineup of members. Starting with Steve, there was former Vice President Al Gore, Bill Campbell from the finance software giant Intuit, Mickey Drexler from the apparel giant J. Crew, Arthur Levinson from the biotech giant Genentech, and Eric Schmidt from Google."

"The Missed Opportunity One day in the late 1990s, during a break in the lunch rush, about five or six people dressed in T-shirts and hoodies came into the shop all at once. Their attire was lackluster, and they didn’t give off an energetic vibe, so I apologetically thought, “What an unremarkable group.” Since it was after the peak of the lunch hour, I asked, “Where do you work?” One of them, sitting at the counter, answered, “Google.” At that time, I was still interested in stock investment. Apologizing to the customers, I often evaluated the appearance, manner of speaking, and atmosphere of those who seemed to be starting ventures, thinking, “How about this company as an investment?” They explained that Google was an internet search company, but that alone wasn’t clear to me. I later looked it up on the internet, but with Yahoo already public and thriving for several years, we judged that Google wouldn’t catch on. As you know, Google later made great strides. Recently, I heard that their stock price surpassed $1,000. That day, among the customers sitting at the counter, I think the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were also there. It’s a shame not to be able to seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But there’s no point in lamenting over the fish that got away."

"Benko started as a start-up entrepreneur and simply remained one, even as the company branched out and grew in width and height. Other start-up entrepreneurs eventually bring in experienced managers to reorganize the company – like Google's bosses did with Eric Schmidt, who had previously led traditional IT companies, or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg with manager Sheryl Sandberg, who had stints at McKinsey and Google."