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| Entrepreneurial Thought - surviving the bubble
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| Marissa Mayer
Google
Marissa leads the product management efforts on Google's search products- web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google's first female engineer and led the user interface and webserver teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google's search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. In her spare time, Marissa also organizes Google Movies- outings a few times a year to see the latest blockbusters- for 6,000+ people (employees plus family members and friends).
Concurrently with her full-time work at Google, Marissa has taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford to over 3,000 students. Stanford has recognized her with the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award for her outstanding contribution to undergraduate education.
Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California.
Graduating with honors, Marissa received her BS in Symbolic Systems and her MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence.
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Marissa Mayer - Google |
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| Ideas come from everywhere
Ideas come from everywhere. A lot of people will say, "Well, how do you get the idea for Google Maps or the Google Toolbar? Where did it come from? And the answer is, in an environment like Google, ever since the company was small, even till now when it's really large, we expect everyone to have ideas. You know, our engineers come up with ideas, some things come top-down, and ideas come from our users. And it's interesting, because when you look at the myriad of different products Google has released, we actually have examples of almost all of the above. Google Maps, you know, the idea for that actually came from an acquisition. We found these engineers in Australia who were just amazingly good at building mapping interfaces and combined them with a bunch of Java Script experts at Google and said, "Okay, let's take their ideas on how you navigate maps, place them on the Web using Java Script, and ultimately build this really great application." So, you know, ideas really do come from all kinds of different inspirations. There's other things that we do that are very strategic and top-down. When we looked at say something like Google Desktop, we thought, "Now, for a lot of strategic reasons we need to have a deeper, more meaningful relationship with our users. What functionality could we provide them that they'll want to have on their computer and that will allow them to access Google really easily all the time?" So sometimes it comes from an overall strategy or a strategic concern, sometimes it comes from, you know, what acquisition that we're doing, and sometimes it just comes from someone wanting to solve a problem that they feel we could solve better. Google News is a great example of that. There was an engineer named Krishna Abarat, and he was a news junkie, and after September 11 he found himself really consumed with reading news, and he found he had the same pattern every day. He would go and visit his favorite 15 news sites, and he would try and find, you know, the same story about anthrax all throughout, you know, the different stories to get all the different perspectives and get the maximum amount of information. And then after he did this for about a month, he thought, "Well, this is kind of silly," because, you know, he's like, "I work at a search engine. I actually could probably crawl all this data, and I could also" you know, he's actually an expert in artificial intelligence, and he thought, "You know, I could cluster things." So he built this little script that crawled his favorite 15 news sites, gathered up all the news, and then clustered it, so it would actually group the stories to read together. And he built this little tool for himself to read news more efficiently, used it for a while, thought it was pretty useful, mailed it out to the company and said, "Hey, like, I use this to read my news. Maybe some of you would find it useful." And, you know, a bunch of us saw that, and we decided, you know, this isn't just an internal tool to help Krishna read news better; this is something that could help a lot of people read news better, and we should, you know, take it up to the next level so it's not just a plain white page with lost of blue links, but actually looks more like a news experience, and make it available to our users. So there's a myriad of different places that ideas come from, and what you really want to do is set up a system where people can feel like they can contribute to those ideas and that the best ideas rise to the top in sort of a Darwinistic way by proof of concept of the powerful prototype, by demonstrating that's it's going to fill a really important user need, and so on and so forth. |
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| Give ideas credit not credit for ideas
Share everything you can. And I think that one of the things that's been really fundamental about Google is we have an incredibly open culture. Until we went public, in fact, until about three months before, our VP of sales got up every day and told us the revenue numbers for the company. And it's amazing when you take a lot of smart, motivated people and give them access to a huge amount of information, how well informed their choices are about what they want to work on and what needs to be done. And I think that's been, you know, really amazing, because it's helped us manage the organization in a way that's really flat. So, you know, you may have heard things like, you know, GE has a 1 to 12 rule, which means for every 12 employees there's 1 manager. You know, we've had a very flat organization, so we have situations where we have 40 or 60 employees with 1 manager. And the idea there is we want people, if they can prioritize their own time and manage themselves really well because they have access to a really broad array of information that works well and it gives them the empowerment and feeling of independence that they need to be really successful. And share everything you can also applies to another philosophy that I think is rather interesting, which, you know, it really struck me from a book that was written by Tom Kelly called "The Art of Innovation." And he has a concept there around taking credit. And he'll say that, you know, one thing that happens sometimes is that when people come up with idea, they'll think that they have a really good idea, and they throw it out there to the organization and then they follow it around, because they want to make sure that everyone knows it's their idea, right? And he said that, you know, there will be people who will become so consumed with, you know, does everyone know this is my idea, that they ultimately stop producing new ideas. And he said that, you know, he made this observation that at IDO he saw this phenomenon where people who just put all their energy into coming up with the most ideas possible and not really worrying about where those ideas flowed inside the organization, or how they got used, or whether or not they got credit, ultimately ended up flourishing more, because they became known as such fountains of ideas that, you know, someone would say, "Well, where did this idea come from?" And they'd say, "Well, I don't know, you know, maybe it was Joe. Joe always has ideas." It was this very interesting concept of not being territorial to the point of actually hindering yourself, and I think it was a really interesting observation, and it's something that we do a pretty good job of practicing at Google, which is not to say that people don't get credit for ideas that they come up with, but I think that people are focused more on the users and on innovation and less on how they themselves, you know, are fulfilled, and as a result they actually have a more fulfilling experience and, you know, are noted for their achievements more. |
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| Work with smart poeople
The next philosophy came off of a flier I saw here that just really struck me. It was in actually in one of the dotcoms had a flier up in the basement of Gates that said, "You're brilliant, we're hiring." And this slogan works actually really well as a job ad. Like in the early days of Google they had this - when we were trying to hire people, our VP of engineering threw out this opportunity where we could all run an ad, and he had a competition for who could come up with the best hiring ad, and I just ripped off this slogan and put it on the top of the result page, and I think it's really funny, because people - it had the highest click through rate of all the ads we put up there, like a factor of 5. People just see it and they're like, "I'm brilliant, click!" And so it was really sort of like, you know, flattery really does get you everywhere, so.... But, you know, the thing that I want to point out here is that it's really wonderful to work in an environment with a lot of smart people. One, because I think it challenges you to think and work on a different level. And the analogy I use for my own life here is that I had a piano teacher when I was in high school, and she had a daughter who was two years older than me, named Laura Beckman, and this interesting thing happened with Laura when she was a junior in high school, which is that she tried out for the volleyball team, and at the end of the trials the coach came to her and said, "You know, Laura, we have a tough case. You're really on the borderline of being varsity, so we're going to give you a choice: you can choose to be on the varsity team, but you're going to bench the entire season, or you can chose to go on the JV team and you can start every game." And most people, when they are faced with that choice, chose to be on the JV team and start, because everyone wants to play more games, and interestingly Laura picked the counterintuitive choice, and she said, "You know what, I want to go and play on the varsity team. "I remember everyone kind of scratching their heads at that. But what was interesting is a year later when everyone came back to try out for senior year, Laura made varsity with flying colors and actually ended up being a starter her senior year, and all the people who started on JV their junior year ended up benching on varsity their senior year. Which I think you guys can all relate that, you know, benching your senior year of high school is a lot worse than benching your junior year. And I remember talking to Laura afterwards. I said, "You know, well, what made you make that choice?" And she just said, "I just knew that if I got to play with the better players, that it would make me better, and that I would ultimately be able to grow and learn a lot." And I think the same thing happens on an intellectual level as well, and I just feel really lucky to be at Google where there's a ton of smart people to learn from, because I think it makes - they challenge you to think and work on a different level than you really thought possible, and the types of perspectives and interesting intellectual arguments they make really give you a whole new way of thinking about things. And it also has a lot of other nice properties, like I referenced earlier, which is that you can give them a lot of empowerment, and you don't have to have a lot of management or bureaucracy in the organization. |
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| A license to pursue dreams.
And this, I think, actually has to do with - probably a lot of you have heard about Google's 20 percent time. How many people here have? This concept that you get to spend one day a week working on whatever you want to work on. And it's interesting, because it almost never plays out like that, right? What we see happen is, you know, it's not like people really religiously say, "Okay, every Friday I'm working on exactly what I want to work on." Sometimes people do that, but more often, you know, they'll work on their core project for a few months, and then they'll take some time off of that and work on their 20 percent project for a few weeks, or they'll work on it on the weekends, or they'll work on it in the evenings, but it's not nearly as principled as 20 percent time. But there's a couple of interesting observations I've seen come out of this. One is that people will say - often ask me, "Well, 20 percent time, doesn't that just mean you're giving away 20 percent of your productivity, because these guys are going to go and work on whatever they want to work on?" And in response to that argument I went and mapped the last six months of 2005, all of the Google product launches and all of our future launches, and tried to determine which ones came from 20 percent time and which ones, you know, came through the normal process. And the answer was 50 percent. So 50 percent of what Google launched in the second half of 2005 actually got built out of 20 percent time. It turns out when you take really smart people, give them really good tools, they build really beautiful, amazing things that are really exciting, and they do it with a lot of passion and momentum, in such a way that, you actually see two and a half times the output of what you would expect given the time. So I think that's a really strong statement. But when I thought about 20 percent time, the key isn't that it's 20 percent or 1 day a week, it's that I think that our engineers and our product developers see that and they realize that this is a company that really trusts them, that really wants them to be creative, and really wants them to explore whatever it is that they want to explore, and it's that license to do whatever they want that really ultimately fuels a huge amount of creativity and a huge amount of innovation. |
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| Innovation, not instant perfection.
So I think it's been interesting to watch, as Google has scaled up, the expectations of our users and of the public of our products, because, you know, now when we launch something, you know, people immediately say, "Well, you know, it's so rough it's not very good". Right, like you know, and it turns out when we were small we launched really rough things that weren't very good all the time. But the key is iteration. When you launch something, can you learn enough about the mistakes that you made and learn enough from your users that you ultimately iterate really quickly? I call this my Max and Madonna theory. We look at, like, Apple, Madonna. They were cool in 1983, they're still cool today, 2006, 23 years later. And that's really amazing to look at, and people think of them as very innovative and very inventive. How do they do it? And the answer is, they don't do it being perfect every single time. You know, there's lots of mess-ups along the way. Apple had the Newton, Madonna had The Sex Book. There's been all kinds of controversies and mistakes made. But the answer is, you know, when they make a mistake, your way out of it or you re-invent yourself. And I think that's ultimately the charge that we have, is to launch these innovations and then make them better. And there's a lot of instances where we've launched, you know, laughable products. When we did Google News, we made laughable mistakes. When we did Google News, I remember we really wanted to launch on the first part of the week. It's something we learned early on, that it's better to launch a product, you know, sometime between Monday and Wednesday than it is later in the week, and we sort of missed - we realized we weren't going to launch by Wednesday, so we decided we would take another four days to make the product better. So we had this meeting on Wednesday, and we said, "Okay, well, we've got a couple of extra days. Should we implement a new feature?" And there were six people on the team, and we got into a big argument. If we had more time to launch this extra feature, should we put in the feature sort by date, or should we have search by location? Would people want to see the freshest news, or would they want to see news that was relevant to their location? And it turns out this might be obvious to some of you, and it's certainly obvious to the journalists which one is going to be more useful, but being computer scientists we didn't really know. And because there were six of us, we ended up in a dead heat. Three people said we should do sort by date, three people said we should do search by location, and the team got locked in an hour-long argument about which one was more important, and in the end I had to sort of step up and say, "Okay, guys, we don't know which one is more important, and we're not going to end up doing either now because we can't make up our minds, so let's just spend four days polishing the thing up and then we'll see what the users say." So we launched on Monday morning, and when we looked at the e-mail that had come in by about 5:00 p.m., we had gotten about 305 messages, and 300 of them asked for sort by date and 3 of them asked for search by location and 2 of them could have been loosely defined to maybe be asking for search by location. But the users answered this question 100 to 1 really easily for us, and it turned out that it was really the right thing to do, to just get the product out there and then have the users tell us where it was most important for us to spend our time. And, you know, we've done other things, like Google Video, I think, is really funny. Now we launched Google Video, and the funniest thing about it is we called it Google Video, but you couldn't actually watch video, so people found this very counterintuitive. It turns out that users really do want to watch video. That was the first feature they asked for. And we - that one isn't as much of a shocker to me. And, you know, so one of our first iterations was actually getting the rights to play video and having a really great player experience in the browser so people could watch the video as opposed to just searching the closed captions. But a lot of times, you know, people would say, "Oh, look at Google, and there's all these innovative things." And they remembered the high points, and they laugh, and I was like, "Have you ever made mistakes?" And the answer is we make mistakes every time, every day, thousands of things wrong with Google and this product that we know we could fix, but if you launch things and iterate really quickly, people forget about those mistakes and they have a lot of respect for how quickly you build the product up and make it better. |
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| Data is apolitical.
I think that - I call this - you know, there's a very interesting feeling around Google. People will come in, like my friends would come in, in, you know, 2000, they would say, "Wow, it's like Stanford with stock options." Because it has a very academic feel. In fact, I had an issue where I would hire people in from other companies, and they were used to giving classic executive presentations where you would get up and say, you know, if you say you had done a user's study, you would say, "The three high points are..." People were having a hard time doing this. This part of it is easy and working well, and, you know, this is a point for future development. And there'd be no data, no numbers at all in this type of executive summary. And, you know, the first thing I would do, is I would sit down and say, "That's never going to fly. There's just no way that that's going to make it through an executive presentation at Google," because, you know, Eric, Larry, Sergey, all the executives want to drill down and they want to hear about the numbers. You can't walk in and say to Larry or Sergey, "Most people are having a hard time finding this, or most people are having a hard time working this feature" because their immediate question is, "How many people did you test, how many people had problems, how was the task, you know, set up?" They really want to drill down into the data. But the interesting property this has is that it makes Google, even as large as we've gotten, I think that the internal politics inside of Google have remained minimal compared to other corporations of its size because we rely so much on the data and we do so much measurement that you don't have to worry, will your idea get picked because you're the favorite, or will someone else's idea get picked because they're the favorite or because they have a better relationship with the person who's the decision maker. The decisions get made based on data, and that really frees people from a lot of those types of concerns. Like, when I do user interface design, you know, a designer will come to me and say, "Well, there's this green on the interface and there's that green on the interface, or we could lay it out this way or that way." And we don't need to make an arbitrary decision, because we'll just run both of them on the site in what we call split A/B testing, where we give some users one experience and some users the other experience, watch the data and the metrics that come out of that, and we'll be able to scientifically and mathematically prove which one users seem to actually be responding to better. So we're blessed because we have a really large user base and we can do things like that. But I think it also has a really nice property in that the decisions and the way people relate to each other is a lot less political. |
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| Creativity loves constraint.
And this sounds really counterintuitive, because when you think about creativity you think about, you know, oh, having a lot of freedom to do whatever you want. And I think that, you know, from my perspective what I see is that a lot of times when you constrain your thoughts, that's when you ultimately see a lot of innovation happen. I have a good friend who's a clockmaker in London. He did the millennium clock among other things. And when I asked him, "Why are you a clockmaker? Why not just be a sculptor and you can sculpt whatever you want?" His answer was that when he was in art class, as a student, he preferred to start on paper that had a mark on it already. He just liked that constraint, because he said, "You know, I feel like if there's a mark on a piece of paper, I can take that mark and in my imagination I can figure out what to turn it into, but a blank piece of paper is almost just too intimidating." He said, "So, like, my sculpture's the same. If I know I'm building a clock, it's like a mark on a piece of paper. It's something that I'm constrained by, but it ultimately makes me want to think my way out of that box and do something really interesting." And I think you see the same thing happening inside of product development on the side of innovation. A lot of times it's when you say, "Okay, Google Desktop Search. We want it to run on 90 percent of computers, so, you know, it can't have a memory footprint larger than 8 megs, and it can't take more than this amount of disk, and what can we do with that? How will the files need to be stored, and what kind of data will we be able to search, and what features can we rule out?" That's when you see a lot of really interesting innovation happen, is when you actually pen in the constraints. |
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| Users, not money.
It's interesting. You know, now I think people understand how Google makes money. In the early days, people say, you know, the first question at any talk like this would be, from the audience, would be, "How does Google make money?" And, you know, a lot of people will say, "Well, aren't you worried as you roll out new products, you know, will there be a business model there, you know with all this innovation?" And to be honest, we don't really worry about that. We worry a lot about whether or not we have users, but we don't worry a lot about business models in the beginning, because it turns out, especially on the Web, and especially with consumer products, money follows consumers. The consumers may choose to subscribe to things themselves. Advertisers also follow consumers, so if you manage to amass huge amount of users and you're doing something that they use every single day, you'll find a way to monetize it. You know, this is sort of the "if you build it, they will come" strategy. Or, you know, Larry always used to like to say that there's no such thing as success failure on the Web. You're in a truly virtual business. How many people have seen this commercial where they show someone launching an e-business, and then they show like the number of orders ratcheting up and saying like when you have a physical problem, like FedEx is your answer, or something like that? Have you people seen this? That's an example of a success failure, a success failure that breeds virtual and physical together, but in a virtual business it's very hard to have a success failure, because if you're really successful and you get used a lot, there's usually a very easy and obvious way to figure out how to monetize it. |
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| Don't kill projects, morph them. And this is, I think, a really interesting and antithetical idea that came from Eric, so once we were analyzing which projects and which products on our site worked really well and which ones, you know, seemed to be faltering, and Eric said to me, "Well, what are you going to do about some of these projects that don't seem to be showing the growth trends that they should be showing?" And I said, "Well, I'm not sure. You know, maybe we should try and rejuvenate them, maybe we should just cancel them, maybe we should, you know, sort of pull them back into the shop and let them work for a while, but not have them be quite so prominent until they've gotten fixed." And he said, "Don't kill projects, morph them." In an environment like Google, where we have really smart people, if an idea has actually managed to make it out the door, I mean, there's a real product there, and there's a lot of people working on it, usually there's some kernel of truth in it. There is something interesting and innovative in that space, and it may be that the way we packaged it or the way we implemented it isn't quite right, but it's important to recognize that that really smart, talented person got interested and excited about this for a reason, and there's probably something that you can do to ultimately make it successful. And I think it's really interesting to think about, you know, not walking away from ideas but instead trying to figure out how to re-package them and how to rejuvenate them. Like some ideas that we all have are just, you know, twaddle, and they should just be discarded as quickly as they came into your head, but I think the idea here is once something has taken on the full life of a project, right, and there's, you know, engineers working on it, there's PMs working on it, there's UI designers working on it, there's a reason it built up that much momentum and that much interest, and there's a reason why so many smart people have spent so much of their time, energy and passion working on this, so just don't walk away from it because it's faltering. Have respect for the fact that there's something interesting there. So I agree like, you know, you can't say every idea is a good idea, but to the point where once it's gotten filtered and it's gotten, you know, life and legs of its own it makes sense to really examine that before killing it. |
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| Is the culture that Google perpetuates one that resembles those of the bubble years? And I think the answer is in some ways, yes, like people who walk into Google say, "Wow, it looks like the bubble never burst here." But there's one key difference, which is that Google makes money. So, right, like I think that there's, you know, that's a key thing that people forget about, because I know you guys were all really young when the bubble happened, and maybe you didn't experience this, but there were a lot of weird things like, you know, we're selling pet food on the Internet at, you know, wholesale prices, but it turns out like pet food is just really heavy, and it really shouldn't be shipped, and that doesn't make a lot of economical sense. You really should buy it at the grocery store right down the street. You know, there's things like that that just didn't make sense as business models, and I think that we've been really committed to having a business model that works from the very beginning. You know, Sergey used to joke that, you know, he needed dates in 2000, and he had to do something to differentiate himself from every other losing money dotcom's, you know, president. So we were very focused on becoming profitable from a very early time, which was not true of most of the companies in the bubble. And I think - you know, when I think about the bubble bursting, I've often compared it to a forest fire, which is, you know, forest fires are, in fact, healthy, right? They clean out a lot of the brush and the overgrowth and all that, and the trees that ultimately survive the forest fire and repopulate are, in fact, healthier because there was something that was healthier about them, and I think that that's ultimately what you see at Google. I think a lot of the good things that happened in all the small companies and start-ups of the bubble persists, but there are a few key differences that caused it to actually survive the forest fire. |
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