Learn more about entrepreneurship with this collection
How to start a successful business
How to build a strong team
How to market your business
The startup phase
- During the early days, most startups are full of energy with no process. They use their sheer force and energy to figure stuff out.
- Being at Google in the early days was like being in graduate school. There were so many interesting projects going on, but no deadlines or plans.
- The interesting part was all of the raw material was there in the room. The trick is all you need to do is to ask the right questions and the answers would come out. For example: If you asked for a product plan, they could create a great product plan — they just didn’t think it was important at the time.
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How to hire the right people
There is a way to systematically hire people better than anyone else. Bob Taylor (founder of ARPANET) said to “sell the dream.”
Here is his approach:
- He called people
- Described what he wanted
- They either got it and got incredibly excited or t...
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193 reads
I have also noticed the greatest products are typically designed for the benefit of the people who are building them.
In Uber’s case, the original product was a private car sharing for a small set of people. Google was built for S...
ERIC SCHMIDT
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Advice for entrepreneurs
- The right founders. The founders have to be smart and good but more importantly the project they are working on needs to be their life's work.
- You need to have some luck.
- Be careful about how much margin you have. The ideal business is to have a business like Microsoft — a mo...
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Failure of architecture
One major complaint is the teams who are doing the work with the products you see are far larger than they should be.
This is a failure of architecture — when you have this many programmers programming, it means they don’t have the right libraries, aka the problem hasn...
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When not to scale
An example of when not to scale was Google Wave. It was launched to great fanfare and a base of passionate users. The difficult part is you can’t tell if something is successful until 6 months after the initial wave of excitement.
Great products have this big fanfare, b...
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Hiring rules at Google in the early days
- Stay away from "friends of friends". The constant problem was somebody was a good employee, had someone they had worked with, who was very loyal, but not from a great university, and did not have a high GPA.
- Stay away from "glue people.” These glue ...
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I don’t agree that you should narrow your focus, you get the best outcome when you get the broadest appeal. (...) I’d be careful to conclude to just do a small thing. All success stems from doing one thing very well — then moving broader.
ERIC SCHMIDT
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403 reads
"20% time"
The idea is you could ask your employees to work on the company for 80% of their time, and the other 20% of the time they could work on whatever they want.
If they are passionate about something, they could work on it as their 20% project. At Google, m...
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Scaling Google
When Eric Schmidt joined Google, they were at 150 employees. In some periods (2004–2005), he had tripled their employees; this is classic Blitzscaling.
The approach: It’s easy to double every year — you can imagine adding a person to each team, adding ...
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Believing you have a product that works before it works
- This is an error especially made by non-technical people. They listen to the technical people who say it works and start to scale the organization before the product is working.
- It’s best to think of this process as a very long and tight funnel. It t...
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2 people can go off and change the world. Every successful project I have worked on within Google over the past 40 years has started off with 2 people working on an idea together.
ERIC SCHMIDT
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241 reads
CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
Related collections
Other curated ideas on this topic:
The Time/Effort Needed To Participate In Well-Being Programs
Among all employees who indicated they could have participated in a physical well-being program in 2020 but didn’t, 38% said it was because they were too busy.
This is particularly concerning, as those most in need of well-being support often have the least time or energy.
Awkward Work Scenarios
- Others taking credit for your work: speak up when presenting your joint ideas, else the boss will remember that the other was the one who did all the talking.
- Overanalyzing your tone or watering down criticism: understand the difference between sou...
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