
Larry Page Wants to Return Google to Its Startup Roots - edj
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/mf_larrypage/all/1
======
steven
FYI this article is adapted from my book on Google out next month. There are
generally two types of book excerpts: those that reprint a discrete section or
those that draw from the whole to stitch together an article reflecting the
reporting. This one is the latter--when Google announced that Larry would be
the CEO, Wired (which secured the serial rights) chose to focus on him. I drew
on anecdotes throughout the book, as well as interviews with Larry, to produce
this.

~~~
joshu
Hi Steven!

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staunch
I'd like to see him break Google up in to individual product "companies", each
with their own office, corporate hierarchy, balance sheet, and near complete
autonomy.

Larry would act as the investor, and anyone inside the company could come ask
for money to found a new "company" or for additional funding. Every company
would start out with some kind of "shares" to be distributed by the founders
(with vesting, etc). If a company fails the people would actually lose their
jobs. If they succeed the equity would be worth some proportionally huge
amount.

I don't think any company has ever tried to _truly_ simulate startups on a
scale like this while maintaining the upside and downside of a real startup.

It's just crazy enough to work and he's just crazy enough to try it.

~~~
starpilot
When a project has 200 engineers and 50 in "overhead" (designers, marketing
etc.) behind it though, and you break it off - how is that a startup? It's
still a 250-person company. I don't see how just cutting it off restores
agility that a tiny team with a nascent project has. A large project has more
stuff to break with more people that need more links to communicate,
increasing the inertia of the whole thing and slowing it down.

What might be possible is some type of Skunk Works with independent
leadership, which generates new ideas but leaves the fleshing out to the rest
of the company. It wouldn't be associated with longterm management of one
project though, more as an incubator and consultancy that spins off and checks
in on projects they initiated.

~~~
willifred
>200 engineers and 50 in 'overhead' (designers, marketing etc.)

Is this a deliberate attempt to troll or are designers nothing but overhead?
Poor design, particularly poor interface design, is considered a major factor
in many of Google's product failures (Wave, Google TV, Buzz, et al). User
interface design and consistency are frequently cited as the largest remaining
gap between the Android and iOS experiences.

~~~
TillE
I assume the quotes implied sarcasm.

And in fairness, Wave and Android are hardly perfect examples of engineering.
Wave was buggy and never added significant features, Android is still sluggish
compared to iOS on similar hardware.

Google tends to lack clear direction/leadership/vision at a product level, not
just UI design.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Anyway, it will never be like a startup again until moves are made from
necessity, not whim.

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ChuckMcM
One of the things I admire about Larry is that 'impossible' doesn't seem to be
in his vocabulary. The challenges of having Google be more 'startupy' are
many, some that immediately come to mind;

* Part of the allure of joining a smaller organization is that you can have a huge impact, creating a business from nothing to $10M/year is huge. At Google adding $10M/yr to the bottom line is chump change and you're a chump if that's all you can do.

* One of the great things about smaller organizations is that not only does everyone have a general understanding of the big picture, they have a lot of respect for each other too. Google has grown so complex in its execution that nobody could honestly claim to know how it all works, and of the few who come closest they can't scale to be as many places as they need to be. There is an inverse square law that your level of respect at Google is 1/Jd^2 where Jd is your "Jeff Dean" number.

* Start ups in particular get focus from solving a problem that is painful enough that someone will pay you for your solution, Google invents problems that nobody has and then has to give away their work to get any traction at all.

* Start ups can fire their hardware vendor, pick and choose their own software, build methodology, hiring practices. All of those things are mandated at Google.

Next up I'm afraid is a big poster imploring people to ask themselves, "Is
this good for Google?" That would be sad indeed.

I know adults who would like to simplify their lives to get back to a
lifestyle that is more like the one they had in college. That is perhaps
equally difficult.

~~~
archgoon
>* Part of the allure of joining a smaller organization is that you can have a
huge impact, creating a business from nothing to $10M/year is huge. At Google
adding $10M/yr to the bottom line is chump change and you're a chump if that's
all you can do.

Google has 25,000 employees. I was unaware that on average their yearly income
was increasing at 250 billion a year. Impressive.

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is one of their challenges, adding $10M to the bottom line gets you _no_
respect, creating a new cool toy, huge respect. So consequently the best and
the brightest don't waste their time trying to do that.

I asked once why this was from an 'old timer' (aka someone who had been there
prior to the IPO, was on various promotion committees) and their answer was
honest and direct, "We have plenty of money, so adding more is irrelevant,
what we need are good ideas so we reward that which we need most." (may not be
an exact quote, it was a couple of years ago but its close)

Sadly I could see his point. With nearly $8B of free cash flow (after all the
perks/salaries/taxes/gear etc) that's $400,000 for each and every employee
(back when they had 20K employees) which they could 'pay out' on a whim to
individuals (if they chose to). How do you make that feel more "startup like"?
I think the challenge would be akin to Prince William trying to make the
living experience in Buckingham Palace more like what homeless people feel.
Not impossible but very very difficult I suspect.

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dasil003
The one thing a billion dollar corporation can't do is be a startup again.
There's too much at stake.

If you are truly a passionate early-stage founder, then the only option is to
leave. Of course, Ellison, Gates, Jobs would never do this (willingly, anyway,
in the latter case), because they'll never hit another homerun that big. If
Page left it would be a pretty big stake in the ground.

~~~
gersh
What if Larry Page decides he wants the future is to colonize the moon. Then,
he decides to invests all or a large portions of Google's money in colonizing
the moon. Will anyone stop him? Would this count as a startup again?

~~~
wtn
Sounds like the Oracle sailing team.

~~~
SwellJoe
Except going to the moon is awesome and not at all retarded.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Still effectively zero ROI though. Been there, done that, and all we got to
show for it was a couple rocks and a money pit space station. Personally I'd
vote for Larry using his billions to refund the Superconducting Supercollider.
Now _that_ would be one hell of a startup.

~~~
archangel_one
Not that it wouldn't be great to see it started up again, but how is the
supercollider any less of a money pit than the ISS? I can hardly see it being
a profitable business plan for a startup...

~~~
SkyMarshal
I was just joking about SSI as a startup, but I'd wager that unlocking the
secrets of the fundamental particles of the universe has a great deal more
potential than even ISS's best experiments.

One of our biggest problems re space exploration and colonizing other planets
is that our energy and propulsion systems suck for the task. Imho, materials
science, nanotech, and further drilling down into sub-atomic mechanics is
where we're more likely to make breakthroughs in things like energy
generation, storage, and efficient propulsion.

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shawnee_
_But he has learned that instead of arguing his case with Page, a better
strategy is “giving him shiny objects to play with.”_

 _At the beginning of one Google Voice product review, for instance, he
offered Page and Brin the opportunity to pick their own phone numbers for the
new service. For the next hour, the two brainstormed sequences that embodied
mathematical puns while the product sailed through the review._

This was pretty much my experience with getting to choose my own GV number,
albeit from a long list of "pre-screened" numbers. Had to stop myself from
going through all of them (within an area code) in trying to find a number
that was neat / punny / significant.

~~~
Xuzz
My Google Voice number ends in "HAXX" if you type it on the phone keypad. I
couldn't resist either :(.

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erikpukinskis
If you type it on what?

~~~
Xuzz
This thing, with the letters:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Tel...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Telephone-
keypad2.svg/500px-Telephone-keypad2.svg.png)

(I'm not actually sure what the real name for it is.)

~~~
shrikant
Wow, and the USA is the country that practically _invented_ the system of
1-800-CALL-ME..

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gnosis
_"Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another’s questions. The
idea ran so counter to accepted practice that Griffin felt like she was about
to lose her mind. But Google implemented Page’s suggestion, creating a system
called Google Forums, which let users share knowledge and answer one another’s
customer-support questions. It worked, and thereafter Griffin cited it as
evidence of Page’s instinctive brilliance."_

A forum? Where users can answer each other's questions? What unconventional
brilliance!

It's not like thousands of other companies have forums where users can answer
each other's questions.

 _"Page reiterated his complaint, charging that it was taking at least 600
milliseconds to reload. Buchheit thought, “You can’t know that.” But when he
got back to his office he checked the server logs. Six hundred milliseconds.
“He nailed it,” Buchheit says."_

What preternatural powers of observation Page must have had to guess that a
page reload took half a second.

This article is such a fawning puff-piece.

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paganel
> That was the reaction in 2003 when Denise Griffin, the person in charge of
> Google’s small customer-support team, asked Page for a larger staff.
> Instead, he told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous.
> Rather than assuming the unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page
> said, Google should enable users to answer one another’s questions.

That explains a few things... I wonder why they they even bothered writing
Google Forums, they could have just thrown phpBB at it and call it a day.

------
bane
Google probably can't become a startup again, but it can probably start some
kind of internal startup-like culture to spur internal innovation. If it
"funds" groups of employees to essentially build an autonomously run startup
(and rewards successes with $$$) it can probably save tons of money over the
current acquisition strategy it has (many of which aren't really turning out
to be great performers for Google).

With YC level success rates, it _could_ be a great strategy for them.

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light3
"One way Page tries to keep his finger on Google’s pulse is his insistence on
signing off on every new hire—so far he’s vetted well over 30,000"

Wow that works out to be 9 everyday for the past 10 years, really?!?

~~~
robk
Interesting as word inside the company was that it was more Sergey and that
pretty much stopped, at least outside eng, in 2008.

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loboman
I think this is the first time I read an article that focuses so much in only
one of the Google founders. So far you could only find stories about what the
two founders did together, and little about their individual personalities.
This kind of article is probably more attractive, and paints Page in a more
similar tone than the one people like Gates, Jobs, etc. tend to be written in.
Maybe this is a way to make Google look cool too.

~~~
icegreentea
Well, here's an article that kinda focuses on Sergey (it's about him and
Parkinson's research, so it's only indirectly about Google).

[http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_sergeys_search/all/...](http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_sergeys_search/all/1)

It's interesting in its own right, but also gives some insight into Sergey.

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VladRussian
PR campaign to paint Google as "startup-y" to slow the talent drain into
Facebook and likes ?

~~~
nostrademons
It's fairly likely that the "talent drain into FaceBook" is itself a PR
campaign to speed up the talent drain into FaceBook...

~~~
ecuzzillo
Uh.

Well, we know there have been more-than-several high-profile moves from Google
to Facebook.

How many high-profile moves have there been from Facebook to Google?

~~~
nostrademons
I know the answer to that, but I'm not at liberty to say. It is significant,
though.

Anecdotally (which I _am_ allowed to say), among the people I've worked with
at Google, there have been far more defections to startups than to FaceBook.
Many of them ended up at YCombinator. And the people who leave to found their
own companies generally seem to be of higher quality than the ones who left
for FaceBook - I find I rarely miss the people who defected to FaceBook, while
I very frequently miss the ones who've left to found or join early-stage
startups.

~~~
VladRussian
>I know the answer to that, but I'm not at liberty to say.

that somewhat strange when taken together with the definition of high-profile.

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barmstrong
As the article described his personality ("flaws" included) he started
sounding a lot like Steve Jobs.

Google could really reach new heights with Larry at the helm.

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plinkplonk
In view of the bashing Alex Payne is being subjected to on another thread for
advocating larger than "lifestyle" startups I found this bit interesting
(emphasis mine)

"A few ingredients in Larry Page’s stew of traits stand out unmistakably. He
is brainy, he is confident, he is parsimonious with social interaction. But
the dominant flavor in the dish is his boundless ambition, both to excel
individually and to improve the conditions of the planet at large.

He sees the historic technology boom as a chance to realize such ambitions and
sees _those who fail to do so as shamelessly squandering the opportunity_. To
Page, _the only true failure is not attempting the audacious_. “Even if you
fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely,” he says.
“That’s the thing that people don’t get.”

Also,

"(Page’s fixation on speed probably drives his notorious bias toward
utilitarian—some say boring—design. He maintains a militant opposition to eye-
catching animations, transitions, or anything that veers from stark
simplicity.)"

gives me hope he'll undo or at the least discourage some of the new bing-
ification redesigns of Google Search and news. [rant] A bit of javascript
hacking removed the new sidebar from the search page and restored the old
classic "just a searchbar" look for me, but the new Google News redesign is
terrible and close to unusable (and I don't have the time these days to
attempt a JS hack restoration). I would _pay_ to have the old design
back.[/rant]

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dstein
Running the whole company as a startup isn't going to work. But what might
work is to build several skunkworks projects within the company with their own
CEO's. And if the projects are successful to run the companies as subsidiaries
and offer equity (options for the subsidiary, not Google stock) to the people
directly involved in the project's success.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works>

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ck2
_[now] they were ready to hire a CEO. But they would only consider one person:
Steve Jobs_

okay I lol'ed, that caught me off guard

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pdaviesa
I think the biggest difference between startups and established companies
(even those that try to emulate a startup like culture) is the hunger for
success. Established successful tech companies have already accomplished
amazing things and may have cornered or even created the particular market
they're in. They typically have several early employees who have made a
fortune and many employees who are fairly well off from the company's stock
purchase plan. Bill Gates lamented the fact that one of his employees wasn't
quite as motivated as he used to be in the following quote (paraphrased):
"something about a man changes when his net worth surpasses $100 million"

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jmathai
There's no fountain of youth for big companies.

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JoshKalkbrenner
Who is the best person to run a startup? The person with the most experience,
passion, and #### to lose.

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Estragon
I had some nibbles from some google recruiters a little while back, but I let
it drop. It seemed to corporate. But this article makes me think I should give
them another chance.

