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Larry Page Wants to Return Google to Its Startup Roots

238 points by edj 16y ago

VladRussian 16y ago
PR campaign to paint Google as "startup-y" to slow the talent drain into Facebook and likes ?
- yanw 16y ago
  One could argue that Google have always been 'startup-y' and any 'drain' reports can be attributed to media exaggerations and over-echoing of separate cases - as the media often does. Regardless this shake-up is set to streamline management which will accelerate the company's decision making
- nostrademons 16y ago
  It's fairly likely that the "talent drain into FaceBook" is itself a PR campaign to speed up the talent drain into FaceBook...
  - ecuzzillo 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        >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.
shawnee_ 16y ago
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 16y ago
  My Google Voice number ends in "HAXX" if you type it on the phone keypad. I couldn't resist either :(.
  - erikpukinskis 16y ago
    If you type it on what?
    - Xuzz 16y ago
      This thing, with the letters: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Telephone-keypad2.svg/500px-Telephone-keypad2.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Tel... (I'm not actually sure what the real name for it is.)
      - shrikant 16y ago
        Wow, and the USA is the country that practically invented the system of 1-800-CALL-ME..
- aridiculous 16y ago
  This part was where I really started getting suspicious of the journalism. Does anyone really think that two very capable, industrious founders fell for the childish puppeteering distraction by a project manager? This is just Wired appealing to the masses.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
loboman 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_sergeys_search/all/... It's interesting in its own right, but also gives some insight into Sergey.
steven 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Hi Steven!
dasil003 16y ago
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.
- yuhong 16y ago
  But there are still things that can help solve some of the problems, which is the point I think.
- gersh 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    Sounds like the Oracle sailing team.
    - SwellJoe 16y ago
      Except going to the moon is awesome and not at all retarded.
      - SkyMarshal 16y ago
        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 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Estragon 16y ago
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.
barmstrong 16y ago
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.
ChuckMcM 16y ago
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 16y ago
  >* 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.
  - barista 16y ago
    This is a gimmick. Google did lots of evil things hiding behind its motto of do no evil. Similarly this is only a mechanism to attract smart kids out of the college with an allure of high paying "startup". Google can't be a startup again. It's a public company. Too many people's too much money is betting against it.
staunch 16y ago
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.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  That's likely to shut down many, many Google services, though. So many aspects of the company are funded by search advertising. Maintaining an "investor" relationship in them would be a huge distraction. I hope they continue down the "change the world" path by continuing to look at how their expertise in data analysis and AI can do more (like self-driving cars). I'm really excited to see what he does.
- pedrocr 16y ago
  Cypress Semiconductor is a lot like that, with individual teams in competition with one another for funding and resources. You seem to be making it more extreme with people losing their jobs on failure. One of the advantages of having a big company is that you get to attract good people that are more risk adverse and to assign good people to projects more easily. If you let go of that I'm not sure what's the difference between what you described and a VC fund.
- barista 16y ago
  I don't think its going to happen and I don't even think he means itwhen he says that he wants to take Google to be a startup again. I think it's a publicity stunt to attract talent. Just like their "Do no evil" tagline.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
paganel 16y ago
> 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.
jmathai 16y ago
There's no fountain of youth for big companies.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
light3 16y ago
"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 16y ago
  Interesting as word inside the company was that it was more Sergey and that pretty much stopped, at least outside eng, in 2008.
bane 16y ago
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.
dstein 16y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works
JoshKalkbrenner 16y ago
Who is the best person to run a startup? The person with the most experience, passion, and #### to lose.
gnosis 16y ago
"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.
korch 16y ago
Someday, probably around 2027, Google will once again become like a startup company. Whatever that even means. Many years after some new-new-competitor arises and steals Google, Facebook & everyone's users, revenue and hype, and after the ever shifting dunes of the industry's dynamics change notions and models of profitability, and well after these former titans of tech are delegated to subordinate roles under a new cohort of tech titans, then Google can be like a startup again. Imagine that wondrous day when Google's annual revenues dip under $1 billion! Imagine when their global head count contracts to a mere 4k! Imagine the date when the last new Google Doodle appears on the homepage! I wish Google luck in reaching their lofty goal to become a pale shadow of their current self.
pdaviesa 16y ago
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"
plinkplonk 16y ago
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]
ck2 16y ago
[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

238 points by edj 16y ago

VladRussian 16y ago

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

yanw 16y ago
One could argue that Google have always been 'startup-y' and any 'drain' reports can be attributed to media exaggerations and over-echoing of separate cases - as the media often does. Regardless this shake-up is set to streamline management which will accelerate the company's decision making
nostrademons 16y ago
It's fairly likely that the "talent drain into FaceBook" is itself a PR campaign to speed up the talent drain into FaceBook...
- ecuzzillo 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      >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.

shawnee_ 16y ago

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 16y ago
My Google Voice number ends in "HAXX" if you type it on the phone keypad. I couldn't resist either :(.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  If you type it on what?
  - Xuzz 16y ago
    This thing, with the letters: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Telephone-keypad2.svg/500px-Telephone-keypad2.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Tel... (I'm not actually sure what the real name for it is.)
    - shrikant 16y ago
      Wow, and the USA is the country that practically invented the system of 1-800-CALL-ME..
aridiculous 16y ago
This part was where I really started getting suspicious of the journalism. Does anyone really think that two very capable, industrious founders fell for the childish puppeteering distraction by a project manager? This is just Wired appealing to the masses.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

loboman 16y ago

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 16y ago
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/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_sergeys_search/all/... It's interesting in its own right, but also gives some insight into Sergey.

steven 16y ago

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 16y ago
Hi Steven!

dasil003 16y ago

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.

yuhong 16y ago
But there are still things that can help solve some of the problems, which is the point I think.
gersh 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Sounds like the Oracle sailing team.
  - SwellJoe 16y ago
    Except going to the moon is awesome and not at all retarded.
    - SkyMarshal 16y ago
      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 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Estragon 16y ago

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.

barmstrong 16y ago

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.

ChuckMcM 16y ago

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 16y ago
>* 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.
- barista 16y ago
  This is a gimmick. Google did lots of evil things hiding behind its motto of do no evil. Similarly this is only a mechanism to attract smart kids out of the college with an allure of high paying "startup". Google can't be a startup again. It's a public company. Too many people's too much money is betting against it.

staunch 16y ago

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.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
That's likely to shut down many, many Google services, though. So many aspects of the company are funded by search advertising. Maintaining an "investor" relationship in them would be a huge distraction. I hope they continue down the "change the world" path by continuing to look at how their expertise in data analysis and AI can do more (like self-driving cars). I'm really excited to see what he does.
pedrocr 16y ago
Cypress Semiconductor is a lot like that, with individual teams in competition with one another for funding and resources. You seem to be making it more extreme with people losing their jobs on failure. One of the advantages of having a big company is that you get to attract good people that are more risk adverse and to assign good people to projects more easily. If you let go of that I'm not sure what's the difference between what you described and a VC fund.
barista 16y ago
I don't think its going to happen and I don't even think he means itwhen he says that he wants to take Google to be a startup again. I think it's a publicity stunt to attract talent. Just like their "Do no evil" tagline.
- nostrademons 16y ago

paganel 16y ago

> 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.

jmathai 16y ago

There's no fountain of youth for big companies.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

light3 16y ago

"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 16y ago
Interesting as word inside the company was that it was more Sergey and that pretty much stopped, at least outside eng, in 2008.

bane 16y ago

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.

dstein 16y ago

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

JoshKalkbrenner 16y ago

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

gnosis 16y ago

"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.

korch 16y ago

Someday, probably around 2027, Google will once again become like a startup company. Whatever that even means. Many years after some new-new-competitor arises and steals Google, Facebook & everyone's users, revenue and hype, and after the ever shifting dunes of the industry's dynamics change notions and models of profitability, and well after these former titans of tech are delegated to subordinate roles under a new cohort of tech titans, then Google can be like a startup again. Imagine that wondrous day when Google's annual revenues dip under $1 billion! Imagine when their global head count contracts to a mere 4k! Imagine the date when the last new Google Doodle appears on the homepage! I wish Google luck in reaching their lofty goal to become a pale shadow of their current self.

pdaviesa 16y ago

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"

plinkplonk 16y ago

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]

ck2 16y ago

[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