usually in companies there’s a notion of
a hierarchy a set of objectives a
quarterly plans or we had none of that
there’s always people smarter than you
there’s always people who just think
more clearly than you and if you can
find such a person align yourself with
them as a general statement about
society we need to ask the harder
questions and we need to ask for
stronger solutions and one of the
engineers whose name is Ron pounds the
table had said that would be evil and
I’m like oh okay
what what just happened he’s an American
software engineer business person an
executive chairman of alphabet from 2001
to 2011 he served as CEO of Google in
2016 Forbes ranked him as the 100th
richest person in the world with a
fortune of ten point eight billion
dollars he’s Eric Schmidt and here’s my
take on his top ten rules for success
rule number ten is my personal favorite
and make sure to stick around all over
to the end for some special bonus clips
also as eric is talking if he says
something that really resonates with you
leave it in the comments and put it in
quotes so that other people can be
inspired as well usually in companies
there’s a notion of a hierarchy a set of
objectives a quarterly plans or we had
none of that our theory was that the
leadership in particular the Bottoms Up
leadership really should be empowered by
what we were doing and we’d see how far
they get we didn’t have an
eighteen-month strategy we just kept
iterating so what I learned from this is
it fast iteration is the key the most
important thing to do is every week a
new product a new idea just keep pushing
you’d be amazed how much progress you
make in three months or six months the
background that you had you know working
at Novell working at Bell Labs working
at Xerox you know to that point in your
career when you met Larry and Sergey I
wonder what led you to choose that
opportunity next what what about them
was so different that that made you say
okay this is the next thing for me to do
well in my case I’ve been working at
Novell and I was invited to visit Larry
and Sergey who had invited me to their
little office they had all this food on
the table which had been prepared by the
Google
which I thought was rather odd and they
had my background on the whiteboard
which they were projecting and they
proceeded to examine me in terms of my
ideas and the technology we were
building which they disagreed with
completely and I thought well that’s a
very nice meeting and I realized as I
left and it was curiously in an old Sun
building that it was the most
interesting conversation I’d had in a
decade and that’s why I joined it could
it have gone another way was there a
moment that you looked at that if you
look back on that and said if this has
happened I wouldn’t have taken it or
this if this had happened I wouldn’t
have gotten it are there moments like
that I think from my perspective because
I’d already run a large organization I
wanted to work in a very small very very
smart organization I figured Google
would be that you know God knows it came
out so differently but what I learned
what I learned in this process is that
if you can there’s there’s always people
smarter than you there’s always people
who just think more clearly than you and
if you can find such a person align
yourself with them in this case these
two young men are you know they’re you
know they’re in their 20s right and
they’re awfully precocious and I haven’t
had that tough an argument from that you
know young men in a long time and I
thought this is it you know you just
knew
and these people are rare and we now
know them as the great founders in our
industry and I’m sure some of them are
here in the audience if you find such a
person work with them work for them
manage them do whatever it takes when
he’s pitching you what don’t you want to
hear everyone asks what you do what
don’t you want to hear
I want to hear that everybody is focused
on this new architecture and anybody
who’s coming in with plans based on the
earlier architectures you’re not going
to make it you need to be on scalable
plans that solve real problems it’s so
easy to solve a local problem you need
to dream bigger over and over again we
hear ideas that are interesting in a
local context but they’re not big enough
it’s a dream bigger right as a general
statement about society we need to ask
the harder questions and we need to ask
for stronger solutions there is a global
emerging consensus around issues and so
forth together we’re
are we strong the people you hire define
the culture whether you like it or not
so Larry and Sergey when they started
the company said we need to have really
smart people so they hired a rocket
scientist and they hired a medical
doctor and they hired a Stanford
graduate who had been a professional
football player because they figured
that they wanted normal people who had
done something exceptional so in my case
I was a pilot and I had done other
things and they said ok you’re good
enough you know the CEO has to have
something besides being a CEO that makes
them interesting and everyone had
something I would go around I’d say well
what’s special about you it’s like
what’s like Sesame Street you know
what’s special about you and what’s
special about you but there was always
an interesting story
so another lesson I learned is that you
don’t hire generic people you hire
people who’ve had some kind of stress or
achievement or whatever the best people
hired by the way are CFO’s who’s gone
bankrupt because boy have they been
through the war and on the CFO’s I’m the
CFO side and the finance side you want
somebody who’s not going to happen again
and you only go bankrupt once by the way
I think I should create a general
question for all businesses if you were
coaching a business class or a company
how does a company remain nimble today
what does we have to do that maybe my
problem with most strategy conversations
is that they’re always in word out you
know we establish well first we’re the
best in the world because everybody
thinks that which can’t possibly be true
and second we see that all of our
products are going to be successful and
therefore we’ll be very successful in
the future and that’s usually how
strategy has done in businesses I prefer
a completely different approach work
very very very hard to figure out what
the world is going to look like in five
years what will people be doing what
will your customers want
where will cost beat will be in our case
what will networks look like how
important will phones be what will the
apps look like what services and spend
an awful lot of time on that and then
take a look at your offerings what are
the strongest ones which are the ones
are going to iterate quickly you’re
probably going to do fine there you
understand those businesses what about
these others if you think about in the
media business there are business media
businesses that are growing very well
and others that are in great trouble
this is completely predicted five years
ago right so the leaders and the ones
that are in trouble
sure
have right done a five-year plan and
said holy cow what are we going to do
what are the things we do or maybe we
sell ourselves we try something
different but almost all of these
strategic shifts are predictable using
my my five-year model almost nobody does
a five-year plan most businesses do a
one to two year plan you know especially
in our Suites but even in most
businesses the only business that I
discovered that does a five-year or
longer plan is the oil and gas industry
and the reason is because they have to
deploy so much capital and do all this
planning but even there they have
trouble because the prices go up and
down and so forth so even there it’s
difficult what would you tell a founder
they should do to protect and to to hold
on to their equity what advice would you
give them well the I can always tell
when we’re dealing with a proper founder
when we start with how are they spending
their money and so whenever I go into a
startup that has beautiful offices in
really nice chairs
I cringe because that means that they
haven’t quite figured out that it’s not
their money unless it is their money
which case they can waste it on that
when I joined Google the I was given an
office and I had a little corner of a
desk with four other engineers
eventually I was given an 8 by 12 office
where my desk was a door with whatever
hobbyhorses whatever they are like the
tabletop was able were able table a
literally a door which I’ve retained to
try to remind myself of what it takes to
be successful so my office today has
that door in it the great founders are
frugal they understand that the money
needs to be used precisely for certain
areas many of the most successful
founders begin with no salary at all
you know I’ve lots of stories about
Larry and Sergey but let’s just say that
when I started one of them was having
trouble with his car so I had to loan in
his car because his car broke down my
car because he broke down I mean that’s
the kind of stuff we’re talking about
and so if you’re not prepared to live
that you don’t really understand what of
being a founders like I mean it mean for
me you know I’d love to be a founder I’d
love to have a nice corner office with
beautiful view and lots of secretary
wood Lazar that’s not how it works
right and the great founders always
started that way so that should give you
some data I don’t agree that you should
narrow your focus what I believe is that
you get the best outcome when you make
the broadest appeal in terms of
leadership and excitement and so forth
and we worked very hard to make that
happen but there were other other things
for example we would refuse to doing
exclusive deals with people but I would
explain to people well we don’t really
do exclusive deals but we only have the
capacity to work with one and it’s going
to be you right so that there are other
ways of achieving those kinds of things
so I’d be careful too to conclude that
you should do a small thing all success
starts from doing one thing really
really well but you’ll recruit better
with a broader vision that’s credible
and that you can articulate but go back
to that selling the dream right what you
do is selling a dream if you can’t sell
the dream then you’re not going to be
successful I received so many different
kinds of advice I don’t know where to
start one that comes to mind is to have
a coach our board member in 2002 John
doar said you need a coach and I said
well audit the coach I’m going to
establish CEO why would either coach
does something wrong no no you need a
coach everybody needs coach SoDo
Campbell became my coach and it served
Google very well every famous athlete
every famous performer has somebody
who’s a coach somebody who can watch
what they’re doing and say is that what
you really meant did you really do that
they can give them perspective but one
thing people are never good at is seeing
themselves as others see them a coach
really really helps so one of the ideas
that we had a few years ago was that we
would be better off with more and more
people in our ecosystem and the best way
to do that is to essentially help
entrepreneurs be successful that doesn’t
mean they’re captive to us they’re still
going to use competitor products and
competitor ad systems and competitor
platforms but it seems one of the things
that people don’t understand when they
view business is they assume that
business is how to describe it it’s a
zero-sum game that if company a wins
company B loses I’ll tell you that when
Yahoo
was young and Terry Semel was running it
whenever he and his company would win a
deal I would call him to congratulate
him and whenever we would win a deal he
would call me to congratulate me now by
the way we were tough competitors why
would we do that
because we both understood that we were
building a larger market so you can
understand our our goal as philanthropic
you can understand it as making the
world a better place but you can also
understand it as self-interested in the
building more people who understand the
concepts of network computing and
platforms and so forth benefits everyone
including Google 20% time was a rule
with vetted again when I started there
there were two actually interesting one
was don’t be evil in the second one was
20% time don’t be evil I thought was a
joke
um because I mean nobody here is evil
nor the evil you want to be evil and so
I was sitting in the original conference
room in the small building when we’ve
started and there’s this conversation
about ad targeting and a particular ad
click and one of the engineers his name
is Ron pounds the table had said that
would be evil and I’m like oh okay what
just happened and the whole mood of the
room changes and there’s this huge
debate over whether that’s evil or not
and ultimately they didn’t do the change
and so I thought what’s the analogy
they’re in it the analogy was it was
it’s the Kanban system right in Japan
the notion that any employee can stop
the line if they see a poor-quality
thing and it works because of shared
values strong shared values a strong
buy-in to principles takes you far I
think that helped us and that I think it
may or may not be true today that the
company has that feeling but there
certainly its history is clearly that
thank you guys so much for watching I
made this video because Sam Boorstin
asked me to so there’s a famous
entrepreneur that you are made of
profile next leave it down in the
comments below and I’ll see what I can
do I’d also love to know which of the
ten rules had the biggest impact on you
and why what did you learn from this
what are you going to change in your
business your life after watching this
video leave in the comments and I will
join in the discussion I also want to
give a quick shout out to Jim Farrell
Ben Jim thank you so much for buying my
book it really means a lot to me
those are you watching if you want your
chance at a shadow in the future video
make sure to pick up a copy of the book
and email any receipts you can keep
track thank you guys so much for
watching
continue to believe or whatever your one
where it is and I’ll see you soon
well I learned a lot from our founders
and one of the things I learned was ask
the impossible and really dream big what
you learn about people is if you paint a
very broad vision you attract people who
really want to make it happen because
there are dreamers too so you can
inspire people and with that inspiration
you get the smartest people and they
deal with a lot of stuff the can an
organization like Google which espouses
the idea that you’re going to give
people in the organization fifteen or
twenty percent of their time to do
almost anything they want in terms of
innovation can that system work in
smaller companies can that system work
in any companies that a leadership
tenant that can work across a broad
range of companies well in fact it
worked at Google when Google was tiny so
the answer is yes it does work in small
companies remember we give this to
engineers and engineers are not that
clever right if they’re going to work on
something in their twenty percent time
it’s going to be something that’s pretty
related to their training in their
knowledge and that’s why it’s so
powerful very very few people sort of
get off the reservation and do something
completely different from technology and
so forth and if they did we would
encourage it has something manifests
that you can recall come from just that
kind of incubation virtually all of the
interesting apps now came from a
combination of an acquisition and a 20%
time if you look at maps if you look at
Google Earth if you look at chrome and
Android all of them came from somebody
trying something identifying something
and then we would say we have all these
20% timers but we need a real group and
the fastest way to do that was to create
a real group or a bio company I want to
offer a cautionary tale and again having
both read your book and also the notes
that you kindly sent me before this if
you don’t understand the subtlety here
you you would conclude that the correct
thing to do is to grow everything as
fast you possibly can everywhere right
so let’s just make as many engineers as
many salespeople as many products and so
and so on that completely does not work
and it doesn’t work because no product
shall ship before it actually works
right and the way you build great
products is you have small teams with
strong leaders
obsess over trade-offs and they push
things off and they say we’ve got to get
it done and they put a lot of pressure
on the team they work all night and they
produce a product that just barely works
okay the original use non-google
examples the original iPod just barely
worked look at what it became try people
remember the original iPhone no apps
right everyone’s forgotten that just
barely worked but he just was just the
right combination to create an enormous
franchise that’s now 70% of the revenue
of the world’s most valuable company I
was talking to Travis kalanick
we are major investors inside of uber so
we have good relationships with uber and
he has description of uber was that he
understood scaling but the product the
app wasn’t ready so so you have to sort
of have judgment about when the product
is ready to scale against it and so we
would debate this over and over again
and so Larry and Sergey would play
tricks on me so typical example would be
I would say we’re not strong enough to
take on Microsoft and they wanted to do
an operating system in a browser and I
said there’s no scenario where we’ll
ever do an operating system in a browser
and because Microsoft will kill us and I
don’t want to get killed were a small
company and yes yes you’re very smart
yes yes we’re full of smart people and
yes yes we have lots of revenue these
guys can kill us because I’d been
previously killed in previous jobs and
so they hired somebody to to improve the
performance of Firefox six months later
I’m called down to one office and this
person who is supposed to improve the
performance of Firefox has managed to
invent Chrome
shocking good and I say well how long
you been doing this well I’ve been doing
it on the side no you haven’t you’ve
done it full-time well yeah you know I
three other people okay well how many
more people you have ten more people
well good lyric okay dude Larry and
Sergey know about this Larry Ansari
encouraged it I said put those axles all
right you know I knew it I knew they
were going around me right okay hmm so
and then I said well we can’t do an
operating system so they bought this
company called Android and they said
yeah yeah it’s just for smart phones its
software smart phones don’t worry Eric
today Android is 1.4 billion are 1.4
billion plus operating systems used
largest number of operating systems in
the world chrome is large the largest
the most successful browser so it may be
the lesson to learn and management is
I’m just wrong all the time but but the
secret was you sort of you have to have
judgment as to when these things can
scale right and I can give you plenty of
negative examples an obvious one is wave
right it was a complicated email product
that we launched to great fanfare and we
watched its adoption rate Marissa had
this rule which is a good rule that you
cannot a Google you cannot tell how
successful a product is until the first
six months because you get this adoption
cycle and everyone loves the product
cause everyone tests it and then you
watch what happens and the great
products you know they’re bumpy but they
go up well this is what it looked like
like this so it took Eric your friendly
CEO 18 months of going down straight
down before the project was canceled
right
so again lack of due diligence last so
the reason I’m answering your question
in the Blitz growth argument by saying
you’ve got to have the products that you
can scale yep if you have the products
that can scale the thing that’s new is
you can scale very quickly the uber
example once you have an app and a
business model that more or less works
there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go
global and wide successful companies are
a set of things so Google was a was and
is this remarkable technical platform it
also was
new way of doing advertising our way
based advertising and if you go back to
your career and look at what you’ve done
at Salesforce what you did Oracle what I
did at these other jobs they all had the
property that you had an interesting
platform that the technologists saw and
you also had a monetization model the
next generation of that is going to be
applications monetization web services
monetization the way these developers
this new generation can make money
because ultimately if they want a to be
to be very successful there has to be
revenue coming in to focus everything so
so I think for me the fact that we were
able to combine those it was that both
the hardest thing but also the most
powerful thing because when the two work
together it happens very very quickly
a hierarchy a set of objectives a
quarterly plans or we had none of that
there’s always people smarter than you
there’s always people who just think
more clearly than you and if you can
find such a person align yourself with
them as a general statement about
society we need to ask the harder
questions and we need to ask for
stronger solutions and one of the
engineers whose name is Ron pounds the
table had said that would be evil and
I’m like oh okay
what what just happened he’s an American
software engineer business person an
executive chairman of alphabet from 2001
to 2011 he served as CEO of Google in
2016 Forbes ranked him as the 100th
richest person in the world with a
fortune of ten point eight billion
dollars he’s Eric Schmidt and here’s my
take on his top ten rules for success
rule number ten is my personal favorite
and make sure to stick around all over
to the end for some special bonus clips
also as eric is talking if he says
something that really resonates with you
leave it in the comments and put it in
quotes so that other people can be
inspired as well usually in companies
there’s a notion of a hierarchy a set of
objectives a quarterly plans or we had
none of that our theory was that the
leadership in particular the Bottoms Up
leadership really should be empowered by
what we were doing and we’d see how far
they get we didn’t have an
eighteen-month strategy we just kept
iterating so what I learned from this is
it fast iteration is the key the most
important thing to do is every week a
new product a new idea just keep pushing
you’d be amazed how much progress you
make in three months or six months the
background that you had you know working
at Novell working at Bell Labs working
at Xerox you know to that point in your
career when you met Larry and Sergey I
wonder what led you to choose that
opportunity next what what about them
was so different that that made you say
okay this is the next thing for me to do
well in my case I’ve been working at
Novell and I was invited to visit Larry
and Sergey who had invited me to their
little office they had all this food on
the table which had been prepared by the
which I thought was rather odd and they
had my background on the whiteboard
which they were projecting and they
proceeded to examine me in terms of my
ideas and the technology we were
building which they disagreed with
completely and I thought well that’s a
very nice meeting and I realized as I
left and it was curiously in an old Sun
building that it was the most
interesting conversation I’d had in a
decade and that’s why I joined it could
it have gone another way was there a
moment that you looked at that if you
look back on that and said if this has
happened I wouldn’t have taken it or
this if this had happened I wouldn’t
have gotten it are there moments like
that I think from my perspective because
I’d already run a large organization I
wanted to work in a very small very very
smart organization I figured Google
would be that you know God knows it came
out so differently but what I learned
what I learned in this process is that
if you can there’s there’s always people
smarter than you there’s always people
who just think more clearly than you and
if you can find such a person align
yourself with them in this case these
two young men are you know they’re you
know they’re in their 20s right and
they’re awfully precocious and I haven’t
had that tough an argument from that you
know young men in a long time and I
thought this is it you know you just
knew
and these people are rare and we now
know them as the great founders in our
industry and I’m sure some of them are
here in the audience if you find such a
person work with them work for them
manage them do whatever it takes when
he’s pitching you what don’t you want to
hear everyone asks what you do what
don’t you want to hear
I want to hear that everybody is focused
on this new architecture and anybody
who’s coming in with plans based on the
earlier architectures you’re not going
to make it you need to be on scalable
plans that solve real problems it’s so
easy to solve a local problem you need
to dream bigger over and over again we
hear ideas that are interesting in a
local context but they’re not big enough
it’s a dream bigger right as a general
statement about society we need to ask
the harder questions and we need to ask
for stronger solutions there is a global
emerging consensus around issues and so
forth together we’re
are we strong the people you hire define
the culture whether you like it or not
so Larry and Sergey when they started
the company said we need to have really
smart people so they hired a rocket
scientist and they hired a medical
doctor and they hired a Stanford
graduate who had been a professional
football player because they figured
that they wanted normal people who had
done something exceptional so in my case
I was a pilot and I had done other
things and they said ok you’re good
enough you know the CEO has to have
something besides being a CEO that makes
them interesting and everyone had
something I would go around I’d say well
what’s special about you it’s like
what’s like Sesame Street you know
what’s special about you and what’s
special about you but there was always
an interesting story
so another lesson I learned is that you
don’t hire generic people you hire
people who’ve had some kind of stress or
achievement or whatever the best people
hired by the way are CFO’s who’s gone
bankrupt because boy have they been
through the war and on the CFO’s I’m the
CFO side and the finance side you want
somebody who’s not going to happen again
and you only go bankrupt once by the way
I think I should create a general
question for all businesses if you were
coaching a business class or a company
how does a company remain nimble today
what does we have to do that maybe my
problem with most strategy conversations
is that they’re always in word out you
know we establish well first we’re the
best in the world because everybody
thinks that which can’t possibly be true
and second we see that all of our
products are going to be successful and
therefore we’ll be very successful in
the future and that’s usually how
strategy has done in businesses I prefer
a completely different approach work
very very very hard to figure out what
the world is going to look like in five
years what will people be doing what
will your customers want
where will cost beat will be in our case
what will networks look like how
important will phones be what will the
apps look like what services and spend
an awful lot of time on that and then
take a look at your offerings what are
the strongest ones which are the ones
are going to iterate quickly you’re
probably going to do fine there you
understand those businesses what about
these others if you think about in the
media business there are business media
businesses that are growing very well
and others that are in great trouble
this is completely predicted five years
ago right so the leaders and the ones
that are in trouble
sure
have right done a five-year plan and
said holy cow what are we going to do
what are the things we do or maybe we
sell ourselves we try something
different but almost all of these
strategic shifts are predictable using
my my five-year model almost nobody does
a five-year plan most businesses do a
one to two year plan you know especially
in our Suites but even in most
businesses the only business that I
discovered that does a five-year or
longer plan is the oil and gas industry
and the reason is because they have to
deploy so much capital and do all this
planning but even there they have
trouble because the prices go up and
down and so forth so even there it’s
difficult what would you tell a founder
they should do to protect and to to hold
on to their equity what advice would you
give them well the I can always tell
when we’re dealing with a proper founder
when we start with how are they spending
their money and so whenever I go into a
startup that has beautiful offices in
really nice chairs
I cringe because that means that they
haven’t quite figured out that it’s not
their money unless it is their money
which case they can waste it on that
when I joined Google the I was given an
office and I had a little corner of a
desk with four other engineers
eventually I was given an 8 by 12 office
where my desk was a door with whatever
hobbyhorses whatever they are like the
tabletop was able were able table a
literally a door which I’ve retained to
try to remind myself of what it takes to
be successful so my office today has
that door in it the great founders are
frugal they understand that the money
needs to be used precisely for certain
areas many of the most successful
founders begin with no salary at all
you know I’ve lots of stories about
Larry and Sergey but let’s just say that
when I started one of them was having
trouble with his car so I had to loan in
his car because his car broke down my
car because he broke down I mean that’s
the kind of stuff we’re talking about
and so if you’re not prepared to live
that you don’t really understand what of
being a founders like I mean it mean for
me you know I’d love to be a founder I’d
love to have a nice corner office with
beautiful view and lots of secretary
wood Lazar that’s not how it works
right and the great founders always
started that way so that should give you
some data I don’t agree that you should
narrow your focus what I believe is that
you get the best outcome when you make
the broadest appeal in terms of
leadership and excitement and so forth
and we worked very hard to make that
happen but there were other other things
for example we would refuse to doing
exclusive deals with people but I would
explain to people well we don’t really
do exclusive deals but we only have the
capacity to work with one and it’s going
to be you right so that there are other
ways of achieving those kinds of things
so I’d be careful too to conclude that
you should do a small thing all success
starts from doing one thing really
really well but you’ll recruit better
with a broader vision that’s credible
and that you can articulate but go back
to that selling the dream right what you
do is selling a dream if you can’t sell
the dream then you’re not going to be
successful I received so many different
kinds of advice I don’t know where to
start one that comes to mind is to have
a coach our board member in 2002 John
doar said you need a coach and I said
well audit the coach I’m going to
establish CEO why would either coach
does something wrong no no you need a
coach everybody needs coach SoDo
Campbell became my coach and it served
Google very well every famous athlete
every famous performer has somebody
who’s a coach somebody who can watch
what they’re doing and say is that what
you really meant did you really do that
they can give them perspective but one
thing people are never good at is seeing
themselves as others see them a coach
really really helps so one of the ideas
that we had a few years ago was that we
would be better off with more and more
people in our ecosystem and the best way
to do that is to essentially help
entrepreneurs be successful that doesn’t
mean they’re captive to us they’re still
going to use competitor products and
competitor ad systems and competitor
platforms but it seems one of the things
that people don’t understand when they
view business is they assume that
business is how to describe it it’s a
zero-sum game that if company a wins
company B loses I’ll tell you that when
Yahoo
was young and Terry Semel was running it
whenever he and his company would win a
deal I would call him to congratulate
him and whenever we would win a deal he
would call me to congratulate me now by
the way we were tough competitors why
would we do that
because we both understood that we were
building a larger market so you can
understand our our goal as philanthropic
you can understand it as making the
world a better place but you can also
understand it as self-interested in the
building more people who understand the
concepts of network computing and
platforms and so forth benefits everyone
including Google 20% time was a rule
with vetted again when I started there
there were two actually interesting one
was don’t be evil in the second one was
20% time don’t be evil I thought was a
joke
um because I mean nobody here is evil
nor the evil you want to be evil and so
I was sitting in the original conference
room in the small building when we’ve
started and there’s this conversation
about ad targeting and a particular ad
click and one of the engineers his name
is Ron pounds the table had said that
would be evil and I’m like oh okay what
just happened and the whole mood of the
room changes and there’s this huge
debate over whether that’s evil or not
and ultimately they didn’t do the change
and so I thought what’s the analogy
they’re in it the analogy was it was
it’s the Kanban system right in Japan
the notion that any employee can stop
the line if they see a poor-quality
thing and it works because of shared
values strong shared values a strong
buy-in to principles takes you far I
think that helped us and that I think it
may or may not be true today that the
company has that feeling but there
certainly its history is clearly that
thank you guys so much for watching I
made this video because Sam Boorstin
asked me to so there’s a famous
entrepreneur that you are made of
profile next leave it down in the
comments below and I’ll see what I can
do I’d also love to know which of the
ten rules had the biggest impact on you
and why what did you learn from this
what are you going to change in your
business your life after watching this
video leave in the comments and I will
join in the discussion I also want to
give a quick shout out to Jim Farrell
Ben Jim thank you so much for buying my
book it really means a lot to me
those are you watching if you want your
chance at a shadow in the future video
make sure to pick up a copy of the book
and email any receipts you can keep
track thank you guys so much for
watching
continue to believe or whatever your one
where it is and I’ll see you soon
well I learned a lot from our founders
and one of the things I learned was ask
the impossible and really dream big what
you learn about people is if you paint a
very broad vision you attract people who
really want to make it happen because
there are dreamers too so you can
inspire people and with that inspiration
you get the smartest people and they
deal with a lot of stuff the can an
organization like Google which espouses
the idea that you’re going to give
people in the organization fifteen or
twenty percent of their time to do
almost anything they want in terms of
innovation can that system work in
smaller companies can that system work
in any companies that a leadership
tenant that can work across a broad
range of companies well in fact it
worked at Google when Google was tiny so
the answer is yes it does work in small
companies remember we give this to
engineers and engineers are not that
clever right if they’re going to work on
something in their twenty percent time
it’s going to be something that’s pretty
related to their training in their
knowledge and that’s why it’s so
powerful very very few people sort of
get off the reservation and do something
completely different from technology and
so forth and if they did we would
encourage it has something manifests
that you can recall come from just that
kind of incubation virtually all of the
interesting apps now came from a
combination of an acquisition and a 20%
time if you look at maps if you look at
Google Earth if you look at chrome and
Android all of them came from somebody
trying something identifying something
and then we would say we have all these
20% timers but we need a real group and
the fastest way to do that was to create
a real group or a bio company I want to
offer a cautionary tale and again having
both read your book and also the notes
that you kindly sent me before this if
you don’t understand the subtlety here
you you would conclude that the correct
thing to do is to grow everything as
fast you possibly can everywhere right
so let’s just make as many engineers as
many salespeople as many products and so
and so on that completely does not work
and it doesn’t work because no product
shall ship before it actually works
right and the way you build great
products is you have small teams with
strong leaders
obsess over trade-offs and they push
things off and they say we’ve got to get
it done and they put a lot of pressure
on the team they work all night and they
produce a product that just barely works
okay the original use non-google
examples the original iPod just barely
worked look at what it became try people
remember the original iPhone no apps
right everyone’s forgotten that just
barely worked but he just was just the
right combination to create an enormous
franchise that’s now 70% of the revenue
of the world’s most valuable company I
was talking to Travis kalanick
we are major investors inside of uber so
we have good relationships with uber and
he has description of uber was that he
understood scaling but the product the
app wasn’t ready so so you have to sort
of have judgment about when the product
is ready to scale against it and so we
would debate this over and over again
and so Larry and Sergey would play
tricks on me so typical example would be
I would say we’re not strong enough to
take on Microsoft and they wanted to do
an operating system in a browser and I
said there’s no scenario where we’ll
ever do an operating system in a browser
and because Microsoft will kill us and I
don’t want to get killed were a small
company and yes yes you’re very smart
yes yes we’re full of smart people and
yes yes we have lots of revenue these
guys can kill us because I’d been
previously killed in previous jobs and
so they hired somebody to to improve the
performance of Firefox six months later
I’m called down to one office and this
person who is supposed to improve the
performance of Firefox has managed to
invent Chrome
shocking good and I say well how long
you been doing this well I’ve been doing
it on the side no you haven’t you’ve
done it full-time well yeah you know I
three other people okay well how many
more people you have ten more people
well good lyric okay dude Larry and
Sergey know about this Larry Ansari
encouraged it I said put those axles all
right you know I knew it I knew they
were going around me right okay hmm so
and then I said well we can’t do an
operating system so they bought this
company called Android and they said
yeah yeah it’s just for smart phones its
software smart phones don’t worry Eric
today Android is 1.4 billion are 1.4
billion plus operating systems used
largest number of operating systems in
the world chrome is large the largest
the most successful browser so it may be
the lesson to learn and management is
I’m just wrong all the time but but the
secret was you sort of you have to have
judgment as to when these things can
scale right and I can give you plenty of
negative examples an obvious one is wave
right it was a complicated email product
that we launched to great fanfare and we
watched its adoption rate Marissa had
this rule which is a good rule that you
cannot a Google you cannot tell how
successful a product is until the first
six months because you get this adoption
cycle and everyone loves the product
cause everyone tests it and then you
watch what happens and the great
products you know they’re bumpy but they
go up well this is what it looked like
like this so it took Eric your friendly
CEO 18 months of going down straight
down before the project was canceled
right
so again lack of due diligence last so
the reason I’m answering your question
in the Blitz growth argument by saying
you’ve got to have the products that you
can scale yep if you have the products
that can scale the thing that’s new is
you can scale very quickly the uber
example once you have an app and a
business model that more or less works
there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go
global and wide successful companies are
a set of things so Google was a was and
is this remarkable technical platform it
also was
new way of doing advertising our way
based advertising and if you go back to
your career and look at what you’ve done
at Salesforce what you did Oracle what I
did at these other jobs they all had the
property that you had an interesting
platform that the technologists saw and
you also had a monetization model the
next generation of that is going to be
applications monetization web services
monetization the way these developers
this new generation can make money
because ultimately if they want a to be
to be very successful there has to be
revenue coming in to focus everything so
so I think for me the fact that we were
able to combine those it was that both
the hardest thing but also the most
powerful thing because when the two work
together it happens very very quickly
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