More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The typical CEO knows that the budget shouldn’t be set by how much revenue the business will generate in that fiscal year,
but rather the potential ultimate market value of the venture some years down the road.
she knew that if YouTube were a separate company she could have easily gone to the venture capital community and raised that much and more in a few days.
When companies get big, they devote most of their care and feeding to the business that got them big.
It’s a matter of numbers: A new venture within a big company won’t be able to move the bottom line enough, so the tendency is to say, “Why bother?”
It almost always looks like a better use of capital (and certainly less risky) to invest in the core business than in something that’s highly speculative and not likely to contribute in a meaningful way for years to come.
The antidote to these issues is to break your...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
As a company gets big and complex, you can’t just organize around people who create innovation;
you need to organize around people who can create and lead entire new ventures and businesses.
The decision to create Alphabet was driven in part by the realization that leaders with the audacity and talent to start new businesses are a special breed and are often averse to working within the structure of a big company.
Love the phrase "special breed" and this is spot on! Ties into my "two agency problems" concept...the most talented people at large corporations seek autonomy, whereas less talented people seek comfort and familiarity.
They need the freedom to build things their way, without being forced to adhere to cumbersome processes or politic across various teams.
When you are a big company, it can be hard to hire people like this, and when you do hire them...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
One more thing about CEOs: People like to be close to them. Ask yourself: How many degrees of separation are there between you and your CEO?
Chances are, the lower that number, the higher your ability to get things done in the company.
None of this stuff about giving people air cover and organizing around CEOs works if you don’t get the product right. In fact, Alphabet was created with the idea of clearing the clutter out of our CEOs’ way
so they could spend all of their time on creating products.
The best products are still the ones that are based on technical insights, those unique ideas that apply one or more technologies...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Fortunately, we are smart enough to realize that we aren’t that smart and that many great technical insights are being developed by people who don’t work for Google.
This has led us to acquire a lot of companies,
“deal review,”
is in itself a critical tool to test the insights of our product strategies against the best companies emerging in the field.
Ultimately, the deal isn’t assessed on financial or legal terms, but primarily on its value from a product and organizational standpoint.
We think this type of discussion is tremendously helpful, which is why we are willing to spend precious management time debating a broad pipeline of deals.
Rather than seeing that as time wasted, we have come to realize that it is time well invested.
Not-invented-here attitudes are a real danger in big companies;
you need to have leaders who are OK with acknowledging the limitations (or outright failure) of internal efforts in light of the success of outside ones.
the “think big” approach has threatened to eclipse the less sexy but just as important work of
continuous improvement.
Roofshot Manifesto
(“We choose to go to the roof not because it is glamorous, but because it is right there!”),
called out the “over-glamorization” of the moonshot 10X dogma, at the expense of the very real accomplishments of “methodical, relentless, pers...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“roofs...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“a sequence of roofshots is a compelling innovation model that can produce both quick returns and sustained transformative results.”
The math works: If you do something 1.3X every quarter, you’ll hit 10X within three years.
The other advantage of roofshots is that they give the people working on the products faster gratification:
Moonshots can fail, and a lot of hard work can get put aside and never see the light of day. This happens ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
A few people get to work on moonshots, but everyone can work on roofshots,
driven by 10X goals but working on 2X ideas.
business leaders should be constantly asking themselves the question,
What could be true in five years?
the answer can change s...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
It forces us to look at what’s different today and then imagine what could happen if that trend continues ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
in November 2015, we published an open-source version of our machine learning platform, now called TensorFlow.
Machine learning is still in its infancy:
We hope that by making this amazing platform generally available, we can accelerate research on machine learning technology and spread its benefits to many new types of uses.
If you look around, though, you can easily see lots of situations where we have dumb systems working on complex problems.
Think of any situation where lots of data is available and there are complex problems to be solved.
With machine learning platforms, computers can be trained to solve that problem.
To this day the rule of thumb is that at least half of Google employees (aka Googlers) should be engineers.
When it came to process, the founders ran things with a light touch.
