NextNY Google Event
Friday, June 30, 2006
Yesterday (technically, 2 days ago now) I went to a Google / nextNY sponsored powwow in the Google offices at 40th & Broadway here in New York. There was a limited 100 open slots for this tech talk, and I was lucky enough to get one of them. Ambar Shrivastava, a co-worker of mine was notified by his friend, Rishi Khanna, about the event. I was lucky enough to get spot 88 that opened up. I hadn't met Rishi before, but I ended up waiting in line next to him. He asked what were the chances, and I realized way too late that the answer was 1 in 50.
Anyway, Google made us all sign the standard non-disclosure then proceeded to put us through a public relations event to promote the New York Google operation consisting of 500 people and that we should feel free to talk and blog about the whole event. So here I am doing just that. They just bought a huge facility in Chelsea right next to where I live, which they did not talk about at all, but I get the idea that the whole Broadway office will be moving. They explicitly said that they are hiring advertising sales people in their large market segments including automotive and a couple of others. So, if you're in sales and want to work for Google in NYC, get hopping. Or is that hoping? Either way.
Representatives from Sales, Engineering and Product Management spoke. Marcus Mitchell gave an intro, followed by Dominic Preuss, Tom Thai, David Eun and Dennis Crowley. Tom Thai's presentation consisted of a long tail diagram showing the profile of their ad clients. A few very large clients existed at the head, namely Sony. There was a fairly big middle, then a textbook case of the long tail. I'm feeling like Chris Anderson, seeing long tails everywhere, but Google's sales of AdWords to the tiny marketers of the world must truly be one of the best long tale examples I can think of. The product is digital and inexhaustible.
Of the presenters, all of which were interesting to varying degrees, Dennis Crowley's ending presentation was the best. It's just such a great story where he was a dot-com'er who went back to school for a business degree, and as his senior thesis project did a project called Dodgeball. It was/is social networking software that you email from your cellphone to tell it where you are. It then proceeds to let your entire "real life" social network know where each other are, so you can all gather after work, or whatever. But the point is that him and his partner had little need or motivation to monetize it, and through serendipity, ended up talking with Google folks who got excited about it, and acquired his 2-person company, and he's now a Google employee. He was a really personable guy who could have gone the entrepreneurial route, and chose Google. It's a mixed bag. He's got the awesome resources of Google to tap, still gets to live in NYC (he was an NYU'er), but now has to compete for those resources with everyone else's 20/10 projects.
Ahhh, the now commonly known Google 70/20/10 rule states that 70% of your time goes to the "core" job, consisting mainly of search and AdWords. 20% of your time goes to things related to your main job, and 10% can go to just about anything interesting. This turns Google into a part-time incubator. It reminds me a lot of Motorola where competing GMs compete to turn different technologies and product lines into nearly autonomous companies. It is a strategy of keeping that special edge that Larry and Sergey brought to the picture as young guys. It's tough to preserve that edge as your company gets large and established, and more and more is taken for granted.
I talked with a delightful woman in the pharmaceutical field there about how companies like Google had to be on constant guard for the business equivalent of geological sudden catastrophic liquefaction wherein your entire foundations suddenly disappear beneath you, swallowing up an entire city before you know anything was wrong. What if Apple didn't make the Mac, and subsequently the iPod? Steve Jobs is a person who totally understands sudden obsolescence is moments away for any high tech enterprise. 70/20/10 is Google's attempt to inoculate against that disease. Not everything needs to be a revenue generator, but it does need to keep the users coming back!
Another aspect of 70/20/10 that I later realized is how it breaks up over a business week. If you assume a 5 day work week (not always true, I know), then 5 into 100 is 20. So each workday is 20%. So one day out of 5 can go into anything you want that's related to your main job, but is not your priority. And a half-day can go into anything at all, no matter how off the wall. And in a culture of super-geeks that have a day-and-a-half discretionary time, it creates interesting super-geek-politics, lobbying at lunch for your engineer buddies to work on your 20% project instead of the next guy or gal's. It creates something like a Darwinian idea farm, which I'm sure has emergent behaviors. Certain ideas create excitement or boredom. I heard rumors that Google never cracked the music nut because Sergey just wasn't that into music, and the 20% projects along those lines never got the resources, leaving Yahoo an awesome opening… but who knows.
Anyway, even though it had the tinge of a recruitment effort, it was still a great event to attend. We all went drinking afterwards at Stitch bar on 37th Street, and went a little too late into the night. I ended up taking the next day working from home, finishing up the video. It shifted my wake/sleep cycle a little too late, as this 4:50AM post probably shows. Good night.Labels: Apple, blog, Google
posted by Mike Levin
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