Things haven’t been going too well at Google’s European venture capital firm so the company is restructuring its investment operations into one global organisatio reports Tech.Eu.
Even for the biggest company spotting opportunities isn’t easy.
Tag: google
Open sourcing artificial intelligence
Yesterday Google open sourced many of the features in its Tensorflow artificial intelligence service.
Making the services available to the community will mean many more opportunities to develop the technology. It could well prove to be a turning point for Artificial Intelligence in making it more accessible to the general public and business community.
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Eric Schmidt on managing Google
In an interview with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Google chairman Eric Schmidt describes how he managed the company’s high growth.
“In all my issues at Google, I knew I had no idea what to do, but I knew that I had the best team ever assembled to figure out what to do,” says Google – and now Alphabet – chairman Eric Schmidt in an interview with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.
Schmidt’s interview is a great insight into managing fast growth companies,”almost all small companies are full of energy and no process”. While he reflects on his early days at stricken companies like Sun (“tumultuous and political”) and Novell (“the books were cooked, and people were frauds”).
Moving to Google he found all of his management skills exercised at a company with a unique culture and rapidly growing headcount.
One notable anecdote is how Larry Page kept a 100k cheque from an early investor in his pocket for a month before cashing it.
Compare and contrast that attitude with the current startup mania where by the end of that day a media release would be issued proclaiming the company to be a new unicorn on that valuation.
Schmidt’s view, like many others, is that the real key to success in the company is the people. This echoes the interview with Meltwater’s CEO earlier this week where Jørn Lyseggen described how the key to starting a venture in a new country was the first five people hired.
One great takeaway Schmidt has from his time at Google is how great companies are created through the Minimal Viable Product method, “the way you build great products is small teams with strong leaders who make tradeoffs and work all night to build a product that just barely works.Look at the iPod. Look at the iPhone. No apps. But now it’s 70% of the revenue of the world’s most valuable company.”
Ultimately though Schmidt’s advice is to make decisions quickly, “do things sooner and make fewer mistakes. The question is, what causes me not to make those decisions quickly.”
“Some people are quicker than others, and it’s not clear which actually need to be answered quickly. Hindsight is always that you make the important decisions more quickly.”
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Twitter could be about to go Google
The turmoil at Twitter continues with the directionless service announcing they will lay off eight percent of its workforce – over 300 jobs.
At the same time, the company also announced Google’s Chief Business Officer,Omid Kordestani, would become Twitter’s Executive Chairman.
To compound Twitter’s problems payment system Square announced it will have a stock market IPO, given the two companies share the same CEO and co-founder it’s hard to think Twitter will get the management attention it desperately needs.
It’s hard not to think that Twitter is going to be absorbed by Google, certainly the search engine giant can afford it and they have struggled with social media – although it’s questionable how much Twitter’s star struck management understands its own users, let alone social media in general.
A combination of Twitter’s ineffectual management coupled with Google’s which has consistently shown it struggles with the concept of social media and has a horrible habit of neglecting then shutting down services it loses interest in would probably prove fatal for the service.
Should Twitter fall into Google’s arms and then die of neglect it will be the case of a good idea that was monetized too fast and a management that never quite understood what it was doing.
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Google goes alphabetical
As announced two months ago, Google quietly morphed into Alphabet after stock trading closed on Friday. The Wall Street Journal describes the new structure and the rationale behind it.
It’s hoped putting the smaller, more speculative operations into a separate business units from the company’s core search and advertising businesses will allow managers to be more focused on the business while giving more flexibility to the newer divisions.
One of the major reasons for Google’s reorganisation is the company had become too unwieldy with the WSJ story quoting one former employee who illustrates the problem.
Many entrepreneurs believe “it’s easier to do their business outside Google rather than inside,” said Max Ventilla, who left Google in 2013 to found an education startup. “There’s a lot of red tape for head count and money to get through at Google.”
At the moment it’s not clear that headcount is going to fall under the new structure and certainly some more revisions to the core business are going to be needed to get focus back for products like Google Docs and the local business search operations which have been drifting for some time.
Over the next two years we’ll see how successful the new structure is. If it works, then Alphabet could be showing the new model for corporate conglomerations.
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Slaying the internet’s goliaths
Techmeme has long been one of the most useful sites for technology news and this week it celebrates its tenth year.
For those, like me, who write every day on tech issues the site has been a godsend. Many a time with the end of the day approaching Techmeme has pointed me an article that has got the creative juices flowing.
Gabe Rivera, the site’s founder and CEO, tells of the lessons learned over the past decade with a repeated theme of ‘Techmeme killers’ regularly coming along.
Prominent among them was Google’s relaunch of its Blogsearch product which was billed as a ‘Techmeme killer’. Like so many of Google’s products, Blogsearch was quietly retired two years ago while Techmeme is still around.
Techmeme’s success in the face of an attempt by Google to take over their market isn’t surprising, marketing guru Seth Godin described how his startup, Knol, survived an onslaught from the giant company in 2013.
Despite Google’s cash and market strength, execution matters and often larger companies lack the committed evangelists that give the smaller businesses their energy.
Both Techmeme and Knol show that no company is guaranteed success, despite its resources or power.
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Life at the data frontline
Google’s challenge with managing exponential data growth is something all companies will have to deal with
One of the defining features of the next decade’s successful businesses is how they manage data. No company has a greater challenge in dealing with information than Google.
In a feature tracking Google’s evolving data centres, Techcrunch describes how the company has dealt with the challenge of being the web’s repository.
The challenge has been huge, Google’s current Jupiter network delivers a petabit each second, a hundred times more capacity than its first-generation network and in 2005.
Google boasts 10,000 of their servers are capable of reading all of the scanned data in the Library of Congress in less than a tenth of a second.
While most businesses won’t need that sort of capacity in the near future, the exponential growth Google has dealt with is the same issue facing most managers and business owners as more devices, staff and customers become connected.
For most organisations, dealing with that dramatic growth is almost impossible and this is why automated services running on the cloud will become even more a part of daily working life. Those services will be running on the technology Google is developing today.