YouTube

"AFTER A DECADE in the semiconductor business, Don grew restless, feeling that he had learned what it took to build a startup and engage in a turnaround and that, for him, there were no more mountains to left to conquer within the industry. At National he had started making small investments in young companies. Equally important, he had become acquainted with the community of stock analysts since Charlie Sporck had delegated investment relations to the member of the management team who had the quickest tongue – Don. (Go to YouTube and look at videos of Johnny Carson from the 1950s or Ronald Reagan from the early 1960s, to get a sense for the pace of Don’s wit.)"

"When users spend more of their valuable time watching YouTube videos, they must perforce be happier with those videos. It’s a virtuous circle: More satisfied viewership (watch time) begets more advertising, which incentivizes more content creators, which draws more viewership. Our true currency wasn’t views or clicks—it was watch time. The logic was undeniable. YouTube needed a new core metric."

"In September 2011, I sent a provocative email to my boss and the YouTube leadership team. Subject line: “Watch time, and only watch time.” It was a call to rethink how we measured success: “All other things being equal, our goal is to increase [video] watch time.”"

"habitually underestimate how long it takes to get things done. I’d lived through this at Product Search, where they’d insist: “Come on, I’m a smart person. I can surely get more done than that.” It took discipline for people to narrow their lists to three or four objectives for their team, but it made a huge difference. Our OKRs became more rigorous. Everybody knew what counted most. After I took responsibility for search and discovery at YouTube, it only made sense to do the same thing there."

"what were YouTube’s big rocks? People did their own things and let a thousand flowers bloom, but no one could identify the top-level OKRs. Now leadership was saying, “All of your ideas are wonderful. But could we please identify a few of them as our big rocks for this quarter, and for the year?” After that, everyone at YouTube knew our top priorities. All of our big rocks would make it into the jar. That was a giant step toward the goal that swallowed the next four years of my life."

"Susan: Aspirational goals can prompt a reset for the entire organization. In our case, it inspired infrastructure initiatives throughout YouTube. People started saying, “If we’re going to be that big, maybe we need to redesign our architecture. Maybe we need to redesign our storage.” It became a prod for the whole company to better prepare for the future. Everybody started thinking bigger."

"The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies. We sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp; David Sacks co-founded Yammer; and I co-founded Palantir. Today all seven of those companies are worth more than $1 billion each. PayPal’s office amenities never got much press, but the team has done extraordinarily well, both together and individually: the culture was strong enough to transcend the original company."

"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."