

The 3 most important things I learned from Google (part 2) (from employee #13) - jedc
http://googler13.blogspot.com/2011/01/3-most-important-things-i-learned-from_26.html

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JacobAldridge
I'm not sure if this is 'Operate as if in a vacuum' so much as 'Challenge
assumptions', especially if you are entering a competitive market.

Challenge the format, the value, the technology, and the ability of users
(both searchers and advertisers) to learn and adjust when the technology
_delivers_ more value.

It was a ballsy move. Any number of 'hypothetical' scenarios could have seen
it fail massively. Of course, we know that it didn't - and even if it may in
your business, there's still good reason to challenge the assumptions you and
everyone else are making.

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johnrob
_Google completely disregarded the way the entire advertising industry worked
and came up with its own solution as if it existed in a vacuum_

Kind of hard to combine this advice with "get out of the building". Read
enough startup advice, and everything eventually becomes self contradictory.
What's more valuable than advice is knowing when to use it.

~~~
iamwil
every piece of advice has to be abstracted out of their context in order to be
transmitted to others in a succinct way. So many of the adages you hear:
"execution matters more than ideas", "get out of the building", "fail fast",
etc. have been abstracted out of their concrete context for when they were
conceived.

It's your job to take the abstract in their original context and see if it
applies to you and your own context. Some people fail to do this, or they
apply it in a completely wrong or different context, and just dismiss the
advice too readily. And they make the mistake of never really learning the
lesson.

And sometimes, the way you really learn it, to understand the context in which
advice comes from, is to make the same mistake yourself. Too bad, really.

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jedc
The key point IMO was his sentence "What what we knew and ultimately figured
out was that we needed to economically incentivize advertisers to want to do a
better job advertising to our users."

Which leads to his point "Sometimes to find the right answer you have to look
at a problem and work out a solution which completely disregards current
standard practices."

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GBond
> It meant that we weren’t going to have graphical banners on our site.

The topic and timing of this is interesting. I wonder if author posted on this
in response to gmail moving towards image ads?:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151563>

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alphaBetaGamma
"Operate as if in a vacuum" is taking a big risk: if you revolutionise the
industry you win _big_ , if not you die quietly. Most hugely successful
people/companies will have taken huge risks early on. Does that mean that
taking risk is a good idea?

I'm not saying that this is necessarily bad advice, but I think there is some
selection bias here.

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amattson
The trouble is trying to create a new solution without thinking AT ALL about
current practices. You, trying to be inventive, are then constricted by the
thing they're trying not to be. The current model may have some good points,
which could then be worked further through more design iterations, if you were
able to see them. In our emotional competitiveness, it's got to be hard to
single these out.

Also, I wonder if it would be useful to make sure that some people on the team
are familiar only with the end goal and a rough outline of the problem, and
not with current practice, ensuring that their brainstorming isn't tainted by
the "we need to do something DIFFERENT" mindset.

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draz
I suppose it reaffirms why Larry is the new CEO. He had business sense all
along....

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bowmande
It was cool to see them go about challenging the status quo. It is difficult
starting something that goes against the established guard, but it provides
hope for future startup founders wanting to revolutionize an industry.

~~~
kscaldef
Except that Google actually didn't pioneer search advertising...

