ERIC SCHMIDT

• 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...

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...

• 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 deadline...

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...

• 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 ...

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...

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 ...

• 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...