Google Ceo Quotes

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

Nine had heard whisperings that the secretive Bilderberg Group was effectively the World Government, undermining democracy by influencing everything from nations' political leaders to the venue for the next war. He recalled persistent rumors and confirmed media reports that the Bilderberg Group had such luminaries as Barack Obama, Prince Charles, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Tony Blair, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Bush Sr. and George W. Bush. Other Bilderberg members sprung forth from Nine’s memory bank. They included the founders and CEOs of various multinational corporations like Facebook, BP, Google, Shell and Amazon, as well as almost every major financial institution on the planet.

The ultimate gift, in our digital age, is a CEO who has the storytelling talent to capture the imagination of the markets while surrounding themselves with people who can show incremental progress against that vision each day.

as Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: “The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.

The business world traditionally rewards people for being closer to the top (case in point: outrageous CEO salaries) or for being closer to the transactions (investment bankers, salespeople).

General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.

As former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.”27

Investors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google cofounder Larry Page. Planetary Resources’ lead was followed in 2013 by a firm called Deep Space Industries. Its website currently looks like a science fiction film setting, with illustrations of CubeSats, scouting vehicles, and huge mining spacecraft assembled in space and never intended to enter a planet’s atmosphere.

Marissa Mayer, at the time a Google vice president of product management and now CEO of Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “You can’t understand Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”22 This teaching environment is tailored to a child’s learning needs and personality, and children are encouraged to question everything, act of their own volition, and create.

many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove’s highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I’m getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)

The tendency of a CEO, and particularly (speaking from experience) of a new CEO trying to make an impact in a founder-led company, is to try to make too big an impact. It is hard to check that CEO ego at the door and let others make decisions, but that is precisely what needs to be done.

AMAZONGOOGLEFACE ANNOUNCES INTENT TO ACQUIRE DISNEYAPPLESOFT The deal would result in a combined company worth approximately $97.3 quadrillion. "This will be good for consumers," said Jeff Bezos, CEO of AmazonGoogleFace, speaking from the company's offices on an icy dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt.

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.

When a CEO looks around her staff meeting, a good rule of thumb is that at least 50 percent of the people at the table should be experts in the company’s products and services and responsible for product development. This will help ensure that the leadership team maintains focus on product excellence. Operational components like finance, sales, and legal are obviously critical to a company’s success, but they should not dominate the conversation.

At the highest levels of authority, we will probably retain human figureheads, who will give us the illusion that the algorithms are only advisors, and that ultimate authority is still in human hands. We will not appoint an AI to be the chancellor of Germany or the CEO of Google. However, the decisions taken by the chancellor and the CEO will be shaped by AI. The chancellor could still choose between several different options, but all these options will be the outcome of Big Data analysis, and they will reflect the way AI views the world more than the way humans view

How, then, can Apple claim to be 100 percent renewable? It purchases a fraudulent “100 percent renewable” status from electricity producers. The basic way this works is that Apple pays utilities to give it credit for the solar and wind that others use—and to give others the blame for the coal, gas, and nuclear that Apple uses. It’s as if Apple CEO Tim Cook were traveling with nine other people on a yacht powered 90 percent by diesel and 10 percent by a sail—and Cook claimed that he traveled just using the sail, while the others traveled using the diesel. This energy accounting fraud is shameful and destructive, because it leads us to think that we can have innovators like Apple without the uniquely cost-effective energy we get from fossil fuels. Even worse, leading company after leading company, including Facebook, Google, Bank of America, and Anheuser-Busch, is claiming to be 100 percent renewable.[18]

At a young age, Evan would listen in on his father’s long legal calls, which he credits for giving him early business exposure that helped develop his critical thinking and business accumen. He can often become obsessed with ideas, hungrily learning everything he can about them at a rapid pace. Evan is constantly curious and is learning and getting better at being a CEO very quickly. But his two superpowers are (1) his ability to get inside his users’ heads and think like a teenage girl and (2) his knack for attracting brilliant, powerful mentors. Evan loves picking other people’s brains over a walk or a meal. Over the years he has attracted an A-list roster of mentors, including SoftBank’s Nikesh Arora, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Eric Schmidt. He doesn’t just limit these brain dumps to tech luminaries, though, as he often walks and chats with fashion designers, politicians, documentary filmmakers, and other intriguing peers. Often, these impressive people will come speak to Team Snapchat at their Venice headquarters.

How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

As Sergey has commented: “I do think I benefited from the Montessori education, which in some ways gives the students a lot more freedoms to do things at their own pace.” Marissa Mayer, at the time a Google vice president of product management and now CEO of Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “You can’t understand Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”22 This teaching environment is tailored to a child’s learning needs and personality, and children are encouraged to question everything, act of their own volition, and create.

Jim Barksdale, the legendary CEO of Netscape, in one of these management meetings said, ‘If you have facts, present them and we’ll use them. But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine.

merit. It reminds us of our favorite quote from Jim Barksdale, erstwhile CEO of Netscape: “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”37

If we have data, let's look at it. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine.

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”16

This is a common refrain you hear in Silicon Valley: the CEO who picks up the stack of newspapers outside the front door, the founder who wipes the counters.

As far as missteps go, it’s not an inconsequential amount. “Our policy is we try things,” said then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, when announcing in 2010 that the company was pulling the plug on Google Wave. “We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new.” Cofounder Larry Page echoed the sentiment. “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely. That’s the thing that people don’t get.” And in a way, that’s what makes them so prolific. It’s the successful innovators’ dirty little secret: They fail more than the rest of us. SPANX

Marissa Mayer, at the time a Google vice president of product management and now CEO of Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “You can’t understand Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.

We couldn’t figure out why until we went out and did a user study at a nearby college, actually watching students try to use Google. According to Marissa Mayer, at the time a Googler and now CEO of Yahoo, they were so accustomed to cluttered websites that “flashed, revolved, and asked you to punch the monkey” that they thought there had to be more coming.165 They weren’t searching because they were waiting for the page to finish loading. Engineering vice president Jen Fitzpatrick added: “We wound up sticking a copyright tag at the bottom of the page, not so much because we needed a copyright on the page, but because it was a way to say ‘This is the end.’” The copyright notice fixed the problem.

one of our earliest challenges was that users would look at the Google Web page and not type anything. We couldn’t figure out why until we went out and did a user study at a nearby college, actually watching students try to use Google. According to Marissa Mayer, at the time a Googler and now CEO of Yahoo, they were so accustomed to cluttered websites that “flashed, revolved, and asked you to punch the monkey” that they thought there had to be more coming.165 They weren’t searching because they were waiting for the page to finish loading. Engineering vice president Jen Fitzpatrick added: “We wound up sticking a copyright tag at the bottom of the page, not so much because we needed a copyright on the page, but because it was a way to say ‘This is the end.’” The copyright notice fixed the problem.

When Eric became CEO of Novell in 1997, he got some great advice from Bill Gates: Spend 80 percent of your time on 80 percent of your revenue. But this rule can be deceptively hard to actually follow.

Surgeons are using Google Glass in a variety of innovative ways, such as monitoring a patient’s vital signs without having to look up at a monitor.

One is Augmedix, an app that helps doctors do their charting more efficiently. The doctor wears Google Glass during the office visit and has a normal conversation with the patient—without a computer between them. Augmedix sends the audio-video feed from Google Glass to a remote, HIPAA secure location, where a trained scribe uses it to enter patient notes in the patient’s electronic health record.

one in 20 Google searches are related to health.

Consider a forecast Steve Ballmer made in 2007, when he was CEO of Microsoft: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Ballmer’s forecast is infamous. Google “Ballmer” and “worst tech predictions”—or “Bing” it, as Ballmer would prefer—and you will see it enshrined in the forecasting hall of shame, along with such classics as the president of Digital Equipment Corporation declaring in 1977 that “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” And that seems fitting because Ballmer’s forecast looks spectacularly wrong. As the author of “The Ten Worst Tech Predictions of All Time” noted in 2013, “the iPhone commands 42% of US smartphone market share and 13.1% worldwide.”1 That’s pretty “significant.” As another journalist wrote, when Ballmer announced his departure from Microsoft in 2013, “The iPhone alone now generates more revenue than all of Microsoft.”2

He opened up about the major fear keeping him up at night: namely that Google’s cofounder and CEO Larry Page might well have been building a fleet of artificial-intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind. “I’m really worried about this,” Musk said.

Omid Kordestani was at Netscape before coming to Google. As Omid tells it, “Jim Barksdale, the legendary CEO of Netscape, in one of these management meetings said, ‘If you have facts, present them and we’ll use them. But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine.

In a lot of these incumbent businesses, technology is that interesting thing run by that slightly odd group in the other building; it isn’t something that anchors the CEO’s agenda every week. And the impending disruption caused by new competitors entering their markets is something to be fought with battalions of lobbyists and lawyers.

By the time this book reaches your hands, it’s quite possible that Musk and SpaceX will have managed to land a rocket on a barge at sea or back on a launchpad in Florida. Tesla Motors may have unveiled some of the special features of the Model X. Musk could have formally declared war on the artificial intelligence machines coming to life inside of Google’s data centers. Who knows?

Chris Argyris, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, wrote a lovely article in 1977,191 in which he looked at the performance of Harvard Business School graduates ten years after graduation. By and large, they got stuck in middle management, when they had all hoped to become CEOs and captains of industry. What happened? Argyris found that when they inevitably hit a roadblock, their ability to learn collapsed: What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.… Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.… [T]hey become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.192 [italics mine] A year or two after Wave, Jeff Huber was running our Ads engineering team. He had a policy that any notable bug or mistake would be discussed at his team meeting in a “What did we learn?” session. He wanted to make sure that bad news was shared as openly as good news, so that he and his leaders were never blind to what was really happening and to reinforce the importance of learning from mistakes. In one session, a mortified engineer confessed, “Jeff, I screwed up a line of code and it cost us a million dollars in revenue.” After leading the team through the postmortem and fixes, Jeff concluded, “Did we get more than a million dollars in learning out of this?” “Yes.” “Then get back to work.”193 And it works in other settings too. A Bay Area public school, the Bullis Charter School in Los Altos, takes this approach to middle school math. If a child misses a question on a math test, they can try the question again for half credit. As their principal, Wanny Hersey, told me, “These are smart kids, but in life they are going to hit walls once in a while. It’s vital they master geometry, algebra one, and algebra two, but it’s just as important that they respond to failure by trying again instead of giving up.” In the 2012–2013 academic year, Bullis was the third-highest-ranked middle school in California.194

Popular magazine articles and Oprah-style television shows falsely represent work-life balance as an individual challenge, a lifestyle choice available to all women. The feminism on offer is woefully thin and unpleasurable. On the high end of the income scale, feminism seems to mean working even more than men. The media celebrate women such as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her brutal work ethics--magazine articles report, awestruck, they they barely sleep, that their staffs struggle to match their work hours, that they've become the rare female leaders in their spheres by laboring harder than male colleagues. Mayer reported proudly that while at Google, she would sleep under her desk. By this measure, feminism, that Utopian striving for equality that we've carried through centuries of opposition, is boiled down merely to the right to work ourselves to death. If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it. And this is a vision that can be palatable, just barely, only at the high end of the economy where work is plausibly couched in self-actualization. . . . If any feminism is going to be worth its name, it will improve the lives of all women instead of setting them in competition with each other or applying only to this or that region or income stratum. Liberal feminism would grant women the right to compete. A radical feminism would grant women a good life in which they have real power.

This is a common refrain you hear in Silicon Valley: the CEO who picks up the stack of newspapers outside the front door, the founder who wipes the counters. With these actions, the leaders demonstrate their egalitarian natures—we’re all in this together and none of us are above the menial tasks that need to get done.

People always say they don’t have the time to read, but what they are really saying is that they aren’t making it a priority to learn as much as they can about their business. You know who reads a lot about their business? CEOs. So think like a CEO and read.

He settled on chunks of fried lobster soaked in black squid ink. The negotiation hadn’t begun, and Musk was already dishing. He opened up about the major fear keeping him up at night: namely that Google’s cofounder and CEO Larry Page might well have been building a fleet of artificial-intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind.

Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, once said at an Apple University class that a manager’s most important role is to “give the quiet ones a voice.” I love this. Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the opposite approach, urging people to “Be loud!” I love this, too. The two leaders took different approaches to ensure that everyone was heard. This is your goal as well, but there is more than one way to achieve it. You have to find a way to listen that fits your personal style, and then create a culture in which everyone listens to each other, so that all the burden of listening doesn’t fall on you.

founders and CEOs of Apple, Google, and even the explicitly kid-targeted Snapchat app (!)—go to concerted lengths to limit their own kids’ screen time at home.[*][14] Tellingly, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs forbade his young children to play with the then newly launched iPad.

As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work wrote, “AI is accelerating innovation in every scientific and engineering endeavor.”5 Not since electricity has a breakthrough technology ushered in so much potential promise and peril.

Always Keep Learning

Racism, xenophobia and racial segregation never disappeared. These things went underground and are now being applied by companies like Google, Amazon and many others. It is not a coincidence that despite the equalization of opportunities that the internet provides, the resources of the world keep going to the same 2 countries and you keep buying information from people that live in those same 2 countries and being exposed only to products of those same 2 countries. The opportunities are not the same for everyone because they are being monopolized and controlled. The excuse of always, your security, is being used to bomb nations and also steal all of your rights, including the right to privacy and to the same opportunities. When there are threats against those nations by some who want to annihilate them, they also make you believe that this is something horrible, while making you believe that the opposite is justified. And like dumb rats in a lab experiment, the population keeps pressing the same buttons until they die in absolute misery and ignorance, fighting each other and never seeing the real enemy. Work harder, they say! The least thing they need is for you to notice these differences. They then put some Indian as the CEO or Prime Minister of one of these companies or nations to gaslight you and make you think that you are crazy, and that the opportunities exist and that they are liberal. And when your warn the dumb chickens that they are heading to the slaughterhouse, the dumb chickens, in love with their captivity and their corn, say that you are the crazy one.

Roomba, made headlines when the company’s CEO, Colin Angle, told Reuters about its data-based business strategy for the smart home, starting with a new revenue stream derived from selling floor plans of customers’ homes scraped from the machine’s new mapping capabilities. Angle indicated that iRobot could reach a deal to sell its maps to Google, Amazon, or Apple within the next two years. In preparation for this entry into surveillance competition, a camera, new sensors, and software had already been added to Roomba’s premier line, enabling new functions, including the ability to build a map while tracking its own location. The market had rewarded iRobot’s growth vision, sending the company’s stock price to $102 in June 2017 from just $35 a year earlier, translating into a market capitalization of $2.5 billion on revenues of $660 million.1 Privacy

Dropbox, the cloud storage company mentioned previously that Sean Ellis was from, cleverly implemented a double-sided incentivized referral program. When you referred a friend, not only did you get more free storage, but your friend got free storage as well (this is called an “in-kind” referral program). Dropbox prominently displayed their novel referral program on their site and made it easy for people to share Dropbox with their friends by integrating with all the popular social media platforms. The program immediately increased the sign-up rate by an incredible 60 percent and, given how cheap storage servers are, cost the company a fraction of what they were paying to acquire clients through channels such as Google ads. One key takeaway is, when practicable, offer in-kind referrals that benefit both parties. Although Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacking,” the Dropbox growth hack noted above was actually conceived by Drew Houston, Dropbox’s founder and CEO, who was inspired by PayPal’s referral program that he recalled from when he was in high school. PayPal gave you ten dollars for every friend you referred, and your friend received ten dollars for signing up as well. It was literally free money. PayPal’s viral marketing campaign was conceived by none other than Elon Musk (now billionaire, founder of SpaceX, and cofounder of Tesla Motors). PayPal’s growth hack enabled the company to double their user base every ten days and to become a success story that the media raved about. One key takeaway is that a creative and compelling referral program can not only fuel growth but also generate press.

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting. As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner likes to say, “When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.

La característica más común de los CEO es que tienen un régimen de ejercicio regular (...) Si te mantienes en forma, serás menos propenso a la depresión, pensarás con más claridad, dormirás mejor y ampliarás tu grupo de posibles parejas (...) Trabaja ochenta horas una semana, sé el tipo que se mantiene tranquilo ante el estrés, aborda un problema grande a base de pura fuerza bruta y energía (...) Esta forma de trabajar, sin embargo, a medida que te haces mayor puede matarte de verdad. Así que hazlo pronto, mientras eres joven.

Pocos directores ejecutivos tienen competencias para más de dos de estas etapas. La mayoría de los CEO llegaron a su puesto siendo fundadores, visionarios u operadores, no pragmáticos. Muy probablemente se pueden contar con los dedos de una mano los CEOs de la historia empresarial de Estados Unidos que han dirigido eficazmente sus empresas (o han deseado hacerlo) a lo largo de todo el alfabeto. Después de todo, ¿quién quiere acompañar hacia la muerte a la gran empresa que fundó décadas atrás?

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once reported Google considers over 200 factors to determine which sites rank higher in the results. Today, Google uses well over 200 factors. Google assesses how users are behaving on your site, how many links are pointing to your site, how trustworthy these linking sites are, how many social mentions your brand has, how relevant your page is, how old your site is, how fast your site loads… the list goes on.

Android phones poll 1,200 data points a day from their users and send that back to the Google data-mining mother ship. iOS phones pull 200, and Apple bends over backward to emphasize that data is not being used for profiteering. “The truth is,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in 2018, “we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customers, if we made our customers our product. We’ve elected not to do that.

Strength A decent proxy for your success will be your ratio of sweating to watching others sweat (watching sports on TV). It’s not about being skinny or ripped, but committing to being strong physically and mentally. The trait most common in CEOs is a regular exercise regime. Walking into any conference room and feeling that, if shit got real, you could kill and eat the others gives you an edge and confidence (note: don’t do this). If you keep physically fit, you’ll be less prone to depression, think more clearly, sleep better, and broaden your pool of potential mates. On a regular basis, at work, demonstrate both your physical and mental strength—your grit. Work an eighty-hour week, be the calm one in face of stress, attack a big problem with sheer brute force and energy. People will notice. At Morgan Stanley, the analysts pulled all-nighters weekly, and it didn’t kill us, but made us stronger. This approach to work, however, as you get older, can in fact kill you. So, do it early.

One constant theme was how Sweden’s welfare system worked to encourage risk taking. “The worst that’ll happen is that you will fail, but still be able to live in your apartment and put food on the table. That encourages you to take risks. And some of those risks pay off as world-famous companies,” Daniel said.

Nadella has struck a powerful balance—aligning the Azure ecosystem, where Microsoft is clearly the leader, while allowing partners in the ecosystem to leverage their participation toward progress elsewhere. His goal is not to create the operating system for the intelligent car, for example, but to be the infrastructure that processes the information (at least for now). As Providence St. Joseph Health CEO Rod Hochman explained when announcing his choice to shift the data and applications of his fifty-one-hospital system to the Azure cloud, he chose Microsoft over Amazon, Apple, and Google because “[Microsoft isn’t] trying to be in the health-care business, but [is] trying to make it better.

Being able to figure out quickly what works and what doesn’t can mean the difference between survival and extinction.” —Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist “If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” —Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

At Google’s first shareholders meeting, CEO Eric Schmidt elaborated on why he describes Google’s mission as “serving the Long Tail.

A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary. It doesn’t matter if he got used to making much more than that at Google or if he has a large mortgage and hefty private school tuition bills. If a CEO collects $300,000 per year, he risks becoming more like a politician than a founder.

One of Musk’s most ardent admirers is also one of his best friends: Larry Page, the cofounder and CEO of Google. Page has ended up on Musk’s house-surfing schedule. “He’s kind of homeless, which I think is sort of funny,” Page said. “He’ll e-mail and say, ‘I don’t know where to stay tonight. Can I come over?’ I haven’t given him a key or anything yet.

In 2012, Google Maps had become the premier provider of mapping services and location data for mobile phone users. It was a popular feature on Apple’s iPhone. However, with more consumer activity moving to mobile devices and becoming increasingly integrated with location data, Apple realized that Google Maps was becoming a significant threat to the long-term profitability of its mobile platform. There was a real possibility that Google could make its mapping technology into a separate platform, offering valuable customer connections and geographic data to merchants, and siphoning this potential revenue source away from Apple. Apple’s decision to create its own mapping app to compete with Google Maps made sound strategic sense—despite the fact that the initial service was so poorly designed that it caused Apple significant public embarrassment. The new app misclassified nurseries as airports and cities as hospitals, suggested driving routes that passed over open water (your car had better float!), and even stranded unwary travelers in an Australian desert a full seventy kilometers from the town they expected to find there. iPhone users erupted in howls of protest, the media had a field day lampooning Apple’s misstep, and CEO Tim Cook had to issue a public apology.19 Apple accepted the bad publicity, likely reasoning that it could quickly improve its mapping service to an acceptable quality level—and this is essentially what has happened. The iPhone platform is no longer dependent on Google for mapping technology, and Apple has control over the mapping application as a source of significant value.

six reasons why email is the best: My company AppSumo generates $65 million a year in total transactions. And you know what? Nearly 50 percent of that comes from email. This percentage has been consistent for more than ten years. Don’t believe me? I have 120,000 Twitter followers, 750,000 YouTube subscribers, and 150,000 TikTok fans—and I would give them all up for my 100,000 email subscribers. Why? Every time I send an email, 40,000 people open it and consume my content. I’m not hoping the platform gods will allow me to reach them. On the other platforms, anywhere between 100 and 1 million people pay attention to my content, but it’s not consistent or in my control. I know what you’re saying: “C’mon, Noah, email is dead.” Now ask yourself, when was the last time you checked your email? Exactly. Email is used obsessively by over 4 billion people! It’s the largest way of communicating at scale that exists today. Eighty-nine percent of people check it EVERY DAY! Social media decides who and how many people you’re seen by. One tweak to the algorithm, and you’re toast. Remember the digital publisher LittleThings? Yeah, no one else does, either. They closed after they lost 75 percent of their 20,000,000 monthly visitors when Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018. CEO Joe Speiser says it killed his business and he lost $100 million. You own your email list. Forever. If AppSumo shuts down tomorrow, my insurance policy, my sweet sweet baby, my beloved, my email list comes with me and makes anything I do after so much easier. Because it’s mine. It also doesn’t cost you significant money to grow your list or to communicate with your list, whereas Facebook or Google ads consistently cost money.

Google’s semantic search is the first step toward a search engine that is like Star Trek’s onboard computer and the brains of that semantic search is what Google calls the Knowledge Graph. The word “Graph” here has been taken from mathematics but in this context it was coined by Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who used it to express the social network of relationships within Facebook’s digital boundaries. He called it the Social Graph.

I didn’t have the benefit of having worked under both CEOs, but it dawned on me how deeply a CEO’s persona and focus can shape an institution. Most CEOs are very good at many things, but they become CEOs for being superbly distinctive at one or two, which tend to be matched to a company’s needs at that time. Even CEOs need to declare a major. Welch is best known for Six Sigma—a set of tools to improve quality and efficiency—and his focus on people. Immelt instead emphasized sales and marketing, most visibly through GE’s branded “ecomagination” efforts to make and be perceived as a maker of greener products.

As we thought about what would make us both better and different, two core ideas greatly influenced our thinking: First, technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook—had been run by their founders. More specifically, the innovator was running the company. Second, it was incredibly difficult for technical founders to learn to become CEOs while building their companies. I was a testament to that. But, most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed. Marc and I thought that if we created a firm specifically designed to help technical founders run their own companies, we could develop a reputation and a brand that might vault us into the top tier of venture capital firms despite having no track record. We identified two key deficits that a founder CEO had when compared with a professional CEO: 1. The CEO skill set Managing executives, organizational design, running sales organizations and the like were all important skills that technical founders lacked. 2. The CEO network Professional CEOs knew lots of executives, potential customers and partners, people in the press, investors, and other important business connections. Technical founders, on the other hand, knew some good engineers and how to program.

after meeting the CEO of a company called Rocket Lawyer, Shader recommended Hornik as an investor. Although the CEO already had a term sheet from another investor, Hornik ended up winning the investment. Although he recognizes the downsides, David Hornik believes that operating like a giver has been a driving force behind his success in venture capital. Hornik estimates that when most venture capitalists offer term sheets to entrepreneurs, they have a signing rate near 50 percent: “If you get half of the deals you offer, you’re doing pretty well.” Yet in eleven years as a venture capitalist, Hornik has offered twenty-eight term sheets to entrepreneurs, and twenty-five have accepted. Shader is one of just three people who have ever turned down an investment from Hornik. The other 89 percent of the time entrepreneurs have taken Hornik’s money. Thanks to his funding and expert advice, these entrepreneurs have gone on to build a number of successful start-ups—one was valued at more than $3 billion on its first day of trading in 2012, and others have been acquired by Google, Oracle, Ticketmaster, and Monster.

In general, when you are CEO you should actually make very few decisions. Product launches, acquisitions, public policy issues—these are all decisions that CEOs should make or heavily influence. But there are many other issues where it is OK to let other leaders in the company decide, and intervene only when you know they are making a very bad call. So a key skill to develop as the CEO or senior leader in a company is to know which decisions to make and which to let run their course without you.

As CEO Zhang pointed out to us, the size of a company’s advertising budget might be viewed as a reflection of the distance between the company and its customers. For example, the annual brand value report issued in 2013 by the consulting firm Interbrand noted that Google’s advertising budget is just a tiny fraction of Coca-Cola’s. The likely reason: Google is deeply integrated into people’s lives through its many productivity and social applications, giving it constant user feedback that Coca-Cola doesn’t receive.

world until he was forty. Despite the late start, Bill eventually became the chairman and CEO of Intuit. Following that, he became a legend in high tech, mentoring great CEOs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt of Google. Bill is extremely smart, super-charismatic, and

Google keeps their formulas secret even as they devour more of our habits. CEO Eric Schmidt believes that what customers want is for Google to “tell them what they should be doing next.”[39] Such pronouncements awaken fears of Big Brother or The Matrix. We may need to reclaim our agency, our responsibility.

Google, says its CEO, is more than a mere business; it is a “moral force.

Marissa Mayer, who became one of Silicon Valley’s most famous working mothers not long after she took over as Yahoo’s CEO in 2012, says that burnout isn’t caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you.

In late 2018, Google’s CEO explained to the US Congress why a picture of Donald Trump comes up when you search for “idiot”.

Transparency is crucial. Studies indicate that public goals have more probability of coming true than hidden goals. In an environment run by OKRs, those at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy can also see everyone's goals, even those of the CEO. This opens doors to clear assessment and correction as well. This improves the overall setting of an organization.

Encouraging that many people to spend 20 percent of their time in discovery led to “too many arrows with not enough wood behind them,” as Google CEO Larry Page explained.

About 30 percent of founding CEOs in the billion-dollar group had not worked for anyone other than themselves before. Of those who had, about 60 percent had worked at companies with very well-known brands, like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey. Those “tier-one companies” are famous for their rigorous hiring processes and their tendency to employ the best. Another 28 percent worked at “tier-two companies,” which I define as large and well-known companies that were less sought-after by top talent. Only 14 percent of founders of billion-dollar companies had worked solely at companies that were not well-known brand names.

I knew that Bill Campbell would be the critical person I’d need to persuade one way or another. Bill was the only one of our board members who had been a public company CEO. He knew the pros and cons better than anyone else. More important, everybody always seemed to defer to Bill in these kinds of sticky situations, because Bill had a special quality about him. At the time, Bill was in his sixties, with gray hair and a gruff voice, yet he had the energy of a twenty-year-old. He began his career as a college football coach and did not enter the business world until he was forty. Despite the late start, Bill eventually became the chairman and CEO of Intuit. Following that, he became a legend in high tech, mentoring great CEOs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt of Google. Bill is extremely smart, super-charismatic, and elite operationally, but the key to his success goes beyond those attributes. In any situation—whether it’s the board of Apple, where he’s served for over a decade; the Columbia University Board of Trustees, where he is chairman; or the girls’ football team that he coaches—Bill is inevitably everybody’s favorite person. People offer many complex reasons for why Bill rates so highly. In my experience it’s pretty simple. No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.

En una de sus famosas cartas a los inversores, Jeff Bezos destacó que lo que acaba con las compañías maduras es su apego poco saludable a los procesos acostumbrados. Solo hay que preguntarle a Óscar Muñoz, CEO de United Airlines, quien defendió a los empleados de la aerolínea que sacaron a un pasajero a rastras de un avión, porque «habían seguido los protocolos preestablecidos para hacer frente a ese tipo de situaciones».

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has pointed out: In a world where computing power is nearly limitless, “the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention

David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie’s biographer, has said, “Carnegie could never have imagined the kind of power Zuckerberg has. Politics today is less relevant than it has ever been in our entire history. These CEOs are more powerful than they’ve ever been. The driving force of social change today is no longer government at all.

The original idea, favored by Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, was that every company should aim for a certain level of turnover, whatever the consequences. The system was rife with perverse incentives. Peers who sabotaged others’ work could save their own jobs; managers might hire less-capable people on their teams to keep from having to fire existing employees whom they favored. Despite the system’s drawbacks, Welch’s influence was so far-reaching that stack ranking was adopted at many of today’s tech giants, where it wreaked havoc on morale and productivity for decades. Eventually, its negative effects became well known enough to make the practice a liability at companies chasing workers whose specialized talents made them scarce, such as engineers. In the mid-2010s, companies including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon abandoned it.

Similarly, those Internet tycoons who are apparently so willing to devalue our privacy are vehemently protective of their own. Google insisted on a policy of not talking to reporters from CNET, the technology news site, after CNET published Eric Schmidt’s personal details—including his salary, campaign donations, and address, all public information obtained via Google—in order to highlight the invasive dangers of his company. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg purchased the four homes adjacent to his own in Palo Alto, at a cost of $30 million, to ensure his privacy. As CNET put it, “Your personal life is now known as Facebook’s data. Its CEO’s personal life is now known as mind your own business.” The same contradiction is expressed by the many ordinary citizens who dismiss the value of privacy yet nonetheless have passwords on their email and social media accounts. They put locks on their bathroom doors; they seal the envelopes containing their letters. They engage in conduct when nobody is watching that they would never consider when acting in full view. They say things to friends, psychologists, and lawyers that they do not want anyone else to know. They give voice to thoughts online that they do not want associated with their names. The many pro-surveillance advocates I have debated since Snowden blew the whistle have been quick to echo Eric Schmidt’s view that privacy is for people who have something to hide. But none of them would willingly give me the passwords to their email accounts, or allow video cameras in their homes.

Publicly traded corporations direct financial surpluses back to investors, CEOs, and boards of directors. They have little incentive to churn it back into the business and, as we have seen, a great deal of incentive to maximize surpluses at the expense of employees, the environment, and even the corporation itself.82

At the most senior level, the people with the greatest impact—the ones who are running the company—should be product people. When a CEO looks around her staff meeting, a good rule of thumb is that at least 50 percent of the people at the table should be experts in the company’s products and services and responsible for product development. This will help ensure that the leadership team maintains focus on product excellence. Operational components like finance, sales, and legal are obviously critical to a company’s success, but they should not dominate the conversation.

the autonomous-driving side of things, Alphabet (formerly Google), which has logged several million self-driving-car test miles, continues to lead the pack. At the end of 2016, it created a new business division, called Waymo, for its autonomous driving technology. In May 2017, Waymo and Lyft announced that they would work together on developing the technology, and later in the year, Alphabet invested $1 billion in the start-up. Others, like Cruise Automation (which GM acquired for $1 billion) and Comma.ai, which offers open-source autonomous driving technology in the same vein as Google’s Android mobile operating system, are chasing hard. Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has an autonomous-driving research center in Sunnyvale. Byton—backed by China’s Tencent, Foxconn, and the China Harmony New Energy auto retailer group—has an office in Mountain View, as does Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company in which Apple invested $1 billion. Many of these companies have taken not just inspiration but also talent from Tesla. Part of the value of an innovation cluster like Silicon Valley lies in the dispersal of intellectual labor from one node to the next. For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.

When then senator Obama visited Google in 2007, CEO Eric Schmidt jokingly began the Q&A like a job interview, asking him, “What’s the best way to sort a million thirty-two-bit integers?” Without missing a beat, Obama cracked a wry smile and replied, “I think the Bubble Sort would be the wrong way to go.” The crowd of Google engineers erupted in cheers. “He had me at Bubble Sort,” one later recalled.

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one,

It is a matter of legal record that, for years, the CEOs of Apple, Intel, Google, Pixar, and other Silicon Valley firms operated something very much like a cartel against their own employees. In a scandal that journalists now call “the Techtopus,” these worthies agreed to avoid recruiting one another’s tech workers and thus keep those workers’ wages down across the industry. In 2007, in one of the most famous chapters of the Techtopus story, the famous innovator Steve Jobs emailed Eric Schmidt, demanding that this CEO and friend of top Democrats do something about a Google recruiter who was trying to lure an employee away from Apple. Two days later, according to the reporter who has studied the case most comprehensively, Schmidt wrote back to Jobs to tell him the recruiter had been fired. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s email around with this comment appended: “:)

Our CEO, Danny Wegman, says that ‘leading with your heart can make a successful business.

That a chunk of code written by one person in six weeks could summarize the state of the world was revolutionary. To Google, it was another step toward its stated goal of making the company “an institution that makes the world a better place.” But others in the news business begged to differ. “There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production,” said then News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch. “Their almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it’s theft.

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”—Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google * “A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today . . . I don’t know a more urgent problem than this . . . It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.”—Tristan Harris, former Google employee

As we thought about what would make us both better and different, two core ideas greatly influenced our thinking: First, technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook—had been run by their founders. More specifically, the innovator was running the company. Second, it was incredibly difficult for technical founders to learn to become CEOs while building their companies. I was a testament to that. But, most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed.

People should be part of building the future rather than feeling like the future is being forced upon them. Blitzscaling is what separates the start-ups that get disrupted and disappear as the world changes from the ones that scale up to become market leaders and shape the future. This book was born out of a class we taught at Stanford in which we dissected the process that went into growing the world’s largest technology companies and then codified a series of tactics and choices that made it work. The result was a specific set of principles that describes how to grow multibillion-dollar companies in a handful of years. While writing this book, we talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs and CEOs, including those of the world’s most valuable companies, such as Facebook, Alphabet (Google), Netflix, Dropbox, Twitter, and Airbnb. (You can hear a number of these conversations on my podcast, Masters of Scale.) Even though the stories of their companies’ rise were very different in many ways, the one thing they all had in common was an extreme, unwieldy, risky, inefficient, do-or-die approach to growth.

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.

At a 2017 conference on artificial intelligence and global security, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned participants against complacency when it came to Chinese AI capabilities. Predicting that China would match American AI capabilities in five years, Schmidt was blunt in his assessment: “Trust me, these Chinese people are good. . . . If you have any kind of prejudice or concern that somehow their system and their educational system is not going to produce the kind of people that I’m talking about, you’re wrong.

Eric “Astro” Teller, the CEO of Google’s X research and development lab, which produced Google’s self-driving car, among other innovations. Appropriately enough, Teller’s formal title at X is “Captain of Moonshots.” Imagine someone whose whole mandate is to come to the office every day and, with his colleagues, produce moonshots—turning what others would consider science fiction into products and services that could transform how we live and work.

Scott Hassan: I remember going to this one meeting at Excite, with George Bell, the CEO. He selects Excite and he types “internet,” and then it pops up a page on the Excite side, and pretty much all of the results are in Chinese, and then on the Google side it basically had stuff all about NSCA Mosaic and a bunch of other pretty reasonable things. George Bell, he’s really upset about this, and it was funny, because he got very defensive. He was like, “We don’t want your search engine. We don’t want to make it easy for people to find stuff, because we want people to stay on our site.” It’s crazy, of course, but back then that was definitely the idea: Keep people on your site, don’t let them leave. And I remember driving away afterward, and Larry and I were talking: “Users come to your website? To search? And you don’t want to be the best damn search engine there is? That’s insane! That’s a dead company, right?