<ul><li>During the early days, most startups are full of energy with no process. They use their sheer force and energy to figure stuff out. </li><li>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. </li><li>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.</li></ul>

The startup phase

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 a country, adding a product line, etc.It’s hard to quadruple. It’s difficult to even imagine what quadrupling looks like within an organization.

Scaling Google

No product scales before it works.

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, big drop off, then a small bump back upwards, and steady usage upwards. Google Wave on the other hand had a wave of excitement and then a steady drop-off downwards.Once you have an app and business model that works — you can scale and go global fast.

When not to scale

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 Stanford but mainly for Larry and Sergei themselves. The first Google server was in their bedroom. Once they outgrew this, they put several servers in their home, the garage, then took over the whole house, etc.

<ul><li>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.</li><li>It’s best to think of this process as a very long and tight funnel. It takes a long time to get the product right, then once you get it right you scale up the team as quickly as possible, then go off to a global expansion strategy.</li><li>Another way you know a product is ready is when you and your team can’t stop using it. </li></ul>

Believing you have a product that works before it works

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:<ul><li>He called people</li><li>Described what he wanted</li><li>They either got it and got incredibly excited or they didn’t</li><li>If they didn’t, he went to the next person.</li></ul>How hard is that? If people don’t get it initially, are they really going to get it after some persuasion? Probably not. You want someone who gets it.

How to hire the right people

<ul><li>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. </li><li>Stay away from "glue people.” These glue people are nice people that sit between different groups who assist in activities. They are very loyal and people love them, but the reality is you don't need them — they just slow things down.</li></ul>

Hiring rules at Google in the early days

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.

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, many of the features started as projects turned into core features. Part of the management job was to listen for those 20% project ideas and then aggregate them.

 "20% time"

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’t been generalized enough.

Failure of architecture

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.

"Don’t be evil"

<ul><li>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.</li><li>You need to have some luck.</li><li>Be careful about how much margin you have. The ideal business is to have a business like Microsoft — a monopoly software business with hardware competitors — who are competing for good treatment by you — in a growing industry.</li></ul>

Advice for entrepreneurs

This is session 8 of Technology-enabled Blitzscaling, a Stanford University class taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Allen Blue, and Chris Yeh. This class features Reid Hoffman interviewing Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc. (formerly Google).

Stashed ideas

Blitzscaling 08: Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google

Courage gives us strength. Courage opens doors. Courage saves lives. Courage helps us grow in small and big ways. Everyone from a college graduate entering the workforce for the first time to a world leader running a country must act with courage, not just once but repeatedly. Being courageous is a key component of strong leadership. But what exactly is courage, and how can we access it?

What Is Courage? 

Like so many complex psychological human characteristics, courage can be difficult to nail down. On the surface, courage seems like one of those “I know it when I see it” concepts. Here is the seven traits of courageous people.

How To Be Courageous

<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Intentionality: Be intentional, say no when necessary and be mindful about working on what matters most fosters courage.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Purpose: A person who has strong clarity on their “why,” and who intentionally aligns their actions with their calling, has a higher likelihood of overcoming fear and achieving courageous goals.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Curiosity And Openness: Be curious and open about new things and opportunity</li></ol>

Seven Traits Of Courageous People

4. Commitment: Be consistent on your goal, vision (Why?), no matter what challenges and obstacles your facing right now. It will boost your confidence as well as courage. 5. Embracing Risk: Courage requires taking intentional risks. And the bigger the risk, the more courage it takes (and the bigger the outcome can be). Never afraid of taking risks.

6. Adaptability: People who are able to adapt to change, embrace feedback, navigate new environments and un-learn the human tendency to lean toward comfort and predictability demonstrate a higher capacity for courageous decision making.7. Acceptance: The sooner you can embrace what is and let go of expectations you've attached to particular outcomes, the faster you can navigate life with more courage.

These traits exist within all of us to varying extents. Courage lives within us, even when we don’t feel brave. Courage is not only a noun but a verb. Anyone can "courage" a scary next step, courage their integrity, courage their future. Choosing courage as an action leads to personal growth and positive change. One way you can tap into courage at any time is to ask yourself, “How can I courage this moment?”

The Bottom Line

The Psychology Of Courage: 7 Traits Of Courageous Leaders

People will tell you to hire for intelligence, but intelligence is overrated. Other hiring criteria are equally or more important.  <ul><li>Drive. Self-motivation will cause people to push and push until they succeed. </li><li>Curiosity. Anyone who loves what they do will be intensely curious about it.</li><li>Ethics. Ethics are hard to test for, but if you see any whiff of less than stellar ethics, avoid the candidate.</li></ul>

Criteria for hiring great people

You can see drive in a candidate's eyes and background.<ul><li>Look for what someone has done, not just been involved in or been part of. For example, they started a business in high school. They started and ran a nonprofit in high school.</li><li>If you can't find anything - if the candidate has just followed the rules their whole lives without achieving something distinct and notable, they probably aren't driven. You're not going to change them.</li></ul>

Drive

Someone who loves what they do will read about it, study it, talk to other people about it, immerse themselves in it and work like anything to stay current. Anyone who isn't curious doesn't love what they do.  And you should hire people who love what they do.

Curiosity

Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of conversion are quite low. Ministers and priests should give people another chance, not hiring managers at startups.<ul><li>One way to test for honesty is to see how they react when they don't know something.  They'll either say they don't know, or they'll talk nonsense and hope you won't notice. </li><li>If they're trying to deceive you during the hiring process, they'll deceive you once they're onboard.</li></ul>

Ethics

<ol><li>Have a written hiring process and ensure everyone has a paper copy of it. Many startups have a random hiring process and hire randomly.</li><li>Do basic skills tests. Ask them basic questions about how to do things in their domain. For a sales rep, have them sell you on your product all the way to a closed deal. For a marketing person, have them whiteboard out a launch for your new product. </li><li>Plan out and write down interview questions.</li><li>Pay attention to the little details during the interview process to show what the person will be like.</li><li>Pay attention to the small things during the reference calls.</li></ol>

How to run the hiring process

<ul><li>Know that while you're going to hate firing someone, you'll feel way better after the fact.</li><li>Realise that the great people on your team will be happy that you've done it as they knew the person wasn't working out. But watch how you fire people, as others will watch how you deal with people.</li><li>Realise that you're often doing the person a favour as you're releasing them from a role where they won't get promoted or valued.</li></ul>Be sure to value the people on your team as they are exceptional.

Fixing hiring mistakes

An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog

Marc Andreessen: How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with

A question that lingers in the minds of many working professionals, either experienced or freshers, is whether they should build their own startup or not.A study by Harvard has shown that there are three primary reasons people venture into startups:<ul><li>Many times, it's driven by a zest to really solve a problem that is faced by the future founder itself.</li><li>Sometimes, a major gap is discovered in an industry/sector that the future founder feels he can cover and make money.</li><li>The third reason is love for a particular industry/sector and motivation to grow aggressively..</li></ul>

Building One's Own Startup

Starting up due to Love for a particular industry is often the outcome of creative thinkers, who start their own firm, with the key investment being their creativity.Startup founders are divided into two buckets: Billionaires 1 & 2.

The Two Buckets Of Founders

These are the ones who experiment right from their college days. Most of the time, they connect to the third reason for building a startup- creativity. They love a specific industry and really want to make their mark on it. The biggest advantage college students have is that of low liabilities and tons of resources.A downside is that it's often the first time that they are building anything, and as such, they often make a lot of mistakes, which might hamper the growth or development of their service/product.

Billionaires 1

These are folks who have worked in a particular industry for at least 3-4 years and have identified a gap, which forms the genesis of their startup vision. The gap can be something small, like optimization of a particular sales/marketing/manufacturing process, or building an entirely different operating and business model for the same industry.These folks are quite well suited for a startup, having prior professional experience, knowledge of how things work, soft skills, team building, management, etc.

Billionaires 2

Across all the three reasons and two buckets, a thing that's common is the endpoint. The startup works or it doesn’t. In either case, the founder benefits a lot. For he is someone who has learned real-life lessons, has donned multiple hats, has built a team, a product, a business stream, managed the branding, marketing, etc. These are all the things the founding team is actually expected to do and with this experience, any founder becomes a valuable asset to the organization.

The Endpoint

The question, should you start up, is highly qualitative in nature. Is the problem statement you identified big enough? Do you have any liabilities? Would you be the one who can wear multiple hats for at least 1 year of the startup? Do you have co-founders who are with you on your vision? Do you have enough money in the bank that can sustain you for at least 6months? Do you have industry knowledge of the problem you are solving? A founder needs to be honest about the above questions and gauge independently the feasibility.

The Main Question

We have met folks who are in their 40s and 50s who regret not working on a startup in their 20s. There are folks in their 20s who think they should build a startup once their life is settled off, probably in their late 30s or 40s. And then there are 19-year-olds who think they should start up after some experience. There is no right or wrong age, it's just a moment and the scenarios that help in making the decision.

myPluto helps small teams, young entrepreneurs and ,aspiring product managers to navigate the development of their first product in a structured manner.

Why Should You Startup?

Both start-up and lean start-ups begin with an idea but the major difference occurs with the speed of the process.

Differen

Start-up is a process to create and generate new products through innovation and creativity. But, as reiterated by Erik Reiss, a Lean start-up is a start-up process done very fast. Lean is not for failure, it is a way to stay away from failure by experimenting with the product and market. Lean is built to last, through great experimentation.

Startup Vs Lean Startup 

The start-ups emerge on the basis of ‘build, measure and learn’ . This process is unique to both start-ups and lean start-ups. In the case of building a start-up the process ‘build, measure, and learn’ is a one-time process. But, in a lean start-up, this works in a loop and keeps on working until the product is out and stabilises in the market.

Lean Only

A start-up begins with an idea, feasibility and validity are checked and market demand and many other things are taken into consideration. However, in a lean start-up, things start with an idea but their process is fast. Eric says start up is a great experiment.

Blitzscaling 08: Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google

The Psychology Of Courage: 7 Traits Of Courageous Leaders

Marc Andreessen: How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with

Why Should You Startup?

Start-up and Lean Startup: Differences

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