

Zenter founders and YC grads share their Google acquisition story (audio interview) - scrollinondubs
http://www.grid7.com/archives/178_podcast-24-founders-of-zenter.html

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ecuzzillo
One nitpick: They talked about the "zone-out" button, which students are
supposed to press when they've zoned out of a presentation. There are two
show-stopper problems with that.

One, having zoned out reasonably much in my undergrad career, I can tell you
that zoning out is not something that hits a threshold, and then you realize
"I've zoned out." That is, unless you're consciously zoning out, in which case
you consciously aren't interested in the material, in which case you would
never press the button, since you don't want the professor to get mad.

Two, that assumes that everybody has a laptop (generally, only 20-50% do),
AND, even less plausibly, that they're all looking at the professor's
presentation with their browsers. (probably 1% of all undergrads would ever do
that)

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parker
Just finished listening... this clip is worth the time, a lot of good stuff in
here. I just wish they touched more on how the Google acquisition unfolded,
rather than the "we met some people, yadda yadda" approach. But I'm guessing
they're not at liberty to discuss all the details :)

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staunch
They said the important part: Joe Kraus. You get that guy rooting for you
inside Google and you're probably 90% of the way there.

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nomoresnow_c
I like the one point these guys made about putting emphasis on finding co-
founders who have previously worked on their own side-projects, before people
wanted to pay them to do something.

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davidw
There's an interesting bit at about 28 minutes about working with PG.

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pg
I went and listened to it, and it was quite surprising. I had no idea the
Zenters used to leave our meetings disagreeing with all my suggestions, and
that they only implemented them to prove me wrong.

I remember them saying at the end of the winter that I always "turned out" to
be right about design questions. I should have realized that "turned out"
implies they didn't believe me at first.

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wcrosby
Of course we always thought that what we did was right solution. When someone
criticized it, it was a natural instinct to defend it.

You have to remember the environment we were in. When you are building a
product, everyone wants to give you advice on how to do it. It is often very
difficult to tell a good suggestion from bad one when you are in the thick of
it. The most effective way we found to filter out good from bad was to mock up
the suggestion (no more than 1 hour). We then looked at the before and after
and tried to make a decision based on what we observed. The hard part for me
was keeping my emotions and ego out of it and allowing myself to think clearly
about what is the "right" solution.

