Larry Page Wants to Return Google to Its Startup Roots

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.

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.<p>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.<p>I don't think any company has ever tried to <i>truly</i> simulate startups on a scale like this while maintaining the upside and downside of a real startup.<p>It's just crazy enough to work and he's just crazy enough to try it.

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

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

<i>But he has learned that instead of arguing his case with Page, a better strategy is “giving him shiny objects to play with.”</i><p><i>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.</i><p>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.

<i>"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."</i><p>A forum? Where users can answer each other's questions? What unconventional brilliance!<p>It's not like thousands of other companies have forums where users can answer each other's questions.<p><i>"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."</i><p>What preternatural powers of observation Page must have had to guess that a page reload took half a second.<p>This article is such a fawning puff-piece.

&#62; 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.<p>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.

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).<p>With YC level success rates, it <i>could</i> be a great strategy for them.

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

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.

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

As the article described his personality ("flaws" included) he started sounding a lot like Steve Jobs.<p>Google could really reach new heights with Larry at the helm.

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)<p>"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.<p>He sees the historic technology boom as a chance to realize such ambitions and sees <i>those who fail to do so as shamelessly squandering the opportunity</i>. To Page, <i>the only true failure is not attempting the audacious</i>. “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.”<p>Also,<p>"(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.)"<p>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 <i>pay</i> to have the old design back.[/rant]

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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works</a>

<i>[now] they were ready to hire a CEO. But they would only consider one person: Steve Jobs</i><p>okay I lol'ed, that caught me off guard

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"

There's no fountain of youth for big companies.

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

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.