The 3 most important things I learned from Google (part 2) (from employee #13) | Hacker News Reader

The 3 most important things I learned from Google (part 2) (from employee #13)

googler13.blogspot.com

61 pointsjedc10 comments

I'm not sure if this is 'Operate as if in a vacuum' so much as 'Challenge assumptions', especially if you are entering a competitive market.

Challenge the format, the value, the technology, and the ability of users (both searchers and advertisers) to learn and adjust when the technology delivers more value.

It was a ballsy move. Any number of 'hypothetical' scenarios could have seen it fail massively. Of course, we know that it didn't - and even if it may in your business, there's still good reason to challenge the assumptions you and everyone else are making.

Google completely disregarded the way the entire advertising industry worked and came up with its own solution as if it existed in a vacuum

Kind of hard to combine this advice with "get out of the building". Read enough startup advice, and everything eventually becomes self contradictory. What's more valuable than advice is knowing when to use it.

every piece of advice has to be abstracted out of their context in order to be transmitted to others in a succinct way. So many of the adages you hear: "execution matters more than ideas", "get out of the building", "fail fast", etc. have been abstracted out of their concrete context for when they were conceived.

It's your job to take the abstract in their original context and see if it applies to you and your own context. Some people fail to do this, or they apply it in a completely wrong or different context, and just dismiss the advice too readily. And they make the mistake of never really learning the lesson.

And sometimes, the way you really learn it, to understand the context in which advice comes from, is to make the same mistake yourself. Too bad, really.

The key point IMO was his sentence "What what we knew and ultimately figured out was that we needed to economically incentivize advertisers to want to do a better job advertising to our users."

Which leads to his point "Sometimes to find the right answer you have to look at a problem and work out a solution which completely disregards current standard practices."

> It meant that we weren’t going to have graphical banners on our site.

The topic and timing of this is interesting. I wonder if author posted on this in response to gmail moving towards image ads?: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151563

"Operate as if in a vacuum" is taking a big risk: if you revolutionise the industry you win big, if not you die quietly. Most hugely successful people/companies will have taken huge risks early on. Does that mean that taking risk is a good idea?

I'm not saying that this is necessarily bad advice, but I think there is some selection bias here.

The trouble is trying to create a new solution without thinking AT ALL about current practices. You, trying to be inventive, are then constricted by the thing they're trying not to be. The current model may have some good points, which could then be worked further through more design iterations, if you were able to see them. In our emotional competitiveness, it's got to be hard to single these out.

Also, I wonder if it would be useful to make sure that some people on the team are familiar only with the end goal and a rough outline of the problem, and not with current practice, ensuring that their brainstorming isn't tainted by the "we need to do something DIFFERENT" mindset.

I suppose it reaffirms why Larry is the new CEO. He had business sense all along....

It was cool to see them go about challenging the status quo. It is difficult starting something that goes against the established guard, but it provides hope for future startup founders wanting to revolutionize an industry.

Except that Google actually didn't pioneer search advertising...

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