Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

by John Doerr

“the gospel of 10x.” Consider Gmail. The main problem with earlier web-based email systems was meager storage, typically 2 to 4 megabytes. Users were forced to delete old emails to make room for new ones. Archives were a pipe dream. During Gmail’s development, Google’s leaders considered offering 100MB of storage—an enormous upgrade. But by 2004, when the product was released to the public, the 100MB goal was dead and forgotten. Instead, Gmail provided a full gigabyte of storage, up to five hundred times more than the competition. Users could keep emails in perpetuity. Digital communication changed forever. That, my friends, is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Gmail didn’t merely improve on existing systems. It reinvented the category and forced competitors to raise their game by orders of magnitude. Such 10x thinking is rare in any sector, on any stage. Most people, Larry Page observes, “tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible.”