
Would you work for a Google-like company that gives you 100% freedom?  You will be fired if you don't make money though. - amichail

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felipe
IMHO "100% freedom" is utopia. You don't have 100% freedom even on a start-up.
In a corp like Google you have managers, and in a start-up you have
customers...

Having said that, if you work for a big high-tech corp (like I did, although I
never worked for Google per se), you will find that it is _hugely_ difficult
and frustrating to push your own idea through the system.

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pg
That would be Y Combinator.

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staunch
One huge difference with YC is the funding amount. YC essentially pays a low
salary for a few months to build a prototype. That narrows the talent pool
down to people with very minimal financial requirements (couldn't be more than
~5% of the total Great Hackers in the US).

Google could afford to take all the other ~95% of Great Hackers by paying a
high salary until the project is either killed or a success. The big problem
is that Google doesn't fire people for failing, they just move them around
like most big companies do. They suffer from the "good effort" syndrome, where
people are rewarded for "trying" even if when they fail to produce "something
users want".

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far33d
5%? Really? There's a huge class of young entrepreneurs, who have limited
financial requirements (notice, I'm not using the word desires), and slightly
older hackers who have greater requirements (car/house/etc) but probably have
worked long enough to supplement the YC income with their own stock options,
savings, etc.

If you really want to build something new and interesting, you should be
willing to make financial sacrifices to make it happen. If you're comfortable,
you probably won't be as hungry.

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staunch
Riches if you succeed and no job if you fail is like a startup.

It's still no substitute for people who want to do real startups. But a good
salary during the effort is a great way to attract all the great hackers that
need reliable income.

Getting a big check or a pink slip at the end is ideal.

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amichail
You might have a better chance of succeeding within a company though,
particularly a company with massive computational resources and accumulated
IP. Scalability would be much easier to deal with. There's also the issue with
name recognition. Having your service on something like Google Labs would give
it lots of publicity. Finally, your service could be added as a feature to a
popular service such as gmail say.

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staunch
Makes me think of the issues PG raised in "The Power of The Marginal". I think
when you're an outsider it seems like those things are huge advantages, but
when you have them they feel more like baggage.

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orlick
Interesting idea. Rather then taking on all of the risk (and reward) by doing
a startup that risk would be spread across all of the employees in the
organization. Sounds like the organization would exist to provide "startup
insurance".

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amichail
This is different from pursuing a startup because you are allowed to make use
of massive resources and whatever IP the company has accumulated.

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zach
So basically something like the classic Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.
environment? But you have to make money, not innovation? If that's what you
mean, no thanks...

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amichail
This would not be a research lab. The goal is to create something that makes
money not publications necessarily. You can try to do something really novel
just as long as it ends up making money.

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nostrademons
Yeah, as long as there are other Google-like companies that give me 100%
freedom that I can go to when I get fired. ;-)

