Paul, I wrote that answer to be concise. I am not trying to write another book on Google. When you build a Google, you can tell me I am wrong.
Everyone I have spoken to that has built a successful company has told me that their ability to manage the long term interests of their company was impaired by losing control of their board of directors.
If Mark Zuckerberg did not have control of his board, the company would have been sold to Yahoo for just under a billion dollars, where Facebook would have died. The Yahoo executives wanted to "Nascar up the site". It would not be a 30 billion dollar dollar company today if the board had been investor controlled.
The reason Friedster failed was that the company was managed from the board of directors by investors which did not use their product. The founders of Friendster were screaming at the board of directors that the website took 40 seconds to load, but the board was more concerned with expanding into new markets and adding features, rather than solving the scalability issues the company was facing. Myspace copied Friendster, solved the scalability issues and dominated until Facebook introduced the feed and notification mechanism and took the college demographic.
If you want to build a long term success like Google, you have to be in a position to ignore your investor's short term desire to improve the company's financials by sacrificing long term growth. The quickest way to increase your margins is to reduce investment in the future.
Most of Google's costs were from their consuming facing search product. Almost all of Google's revenues were from enterprise search. Dropping consumer facing search would have improved Google's financials for sale or IPO. Everyone at the time believed that search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the management team did not have board control, the decisions that would have been forced on the company would had led Google to a different, much grimmer corporate destiny.
The management team at Google believed strongly in the future of internet search and the growth of online advertising. They saw the potential of using search queries to target advertisements and that search engines were uniquely positioned to monetize lead generation; at a time when search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the company had cut its loss centers and focused on its profit centers, the company would not have been as successful as it is today. The operating autonomy of Google's management team was critical to Google's long term success.
I do not care what Paul Buchheit says. Eric Schmidt has on several occasions discussed the advantages of Google's ownership structure and how it enabled Google to ignore outside influences and focus on the long term success of the company. If Paul Buchheit disagrees with the CEO of Google about the importance of Google's ownership structure and the operational autonomy of the management team, then its unfortunate.
pg, the early Google employee has not made any statements to contrary.
He has not asserted anything but the existence of unspecified inaccuracies. Paul was neither on the board of directors and was not involved with this decisions. He is not best source.
Ebay created the market for online auction services. They created a new category of products and services which satisfied needs not fulfilled elsewhere. These startups are not directed at market creation activity and are not disruptive.
If I was a programmer today, I would want to be working in the mobile space. I would do anything that was necessary to associate with people in that area and to gain expertise.
He said that he is willing to work for free for a couple of months and hopes to be paid eventually. I am assuming that he wants to learn some new technologies and find opportunities. An employer is taking on a large risk by having someone with no commitment on a project when it will take them several months to get up to speed and learn the required languages.
If he spends a few months in his spare time learning a project's technology and become effective at contributing and is eventually paid for his continued work on the project, I think that it is a good position to be in.
It reduces the risk to the employer and gives him some opportunity to learn a new technology platform. If he contributes significantly to a project, any employer would be more than happy to pay him at least twice what he is earning now. Even at $25,000 a year, he would cost less than a 1/3rd of the cost of a very competent American programmer.
The average for a well paid programmer is Rb 350,000 from what I have read. At current conversion rates that would be about 4472.51 pounds and 7695.70 USD. At current exchange rates. The salary seems to be higher in Bangalore than elsewhere.
He lives in India. A programmer there makes 350,000 Rs a year. All these responses are so discouraging.
"That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few."
In my startup, we have everyone doing everything. If all someone knows is java, they are useless to us. Each of us had to learn 3 different new languages each just to get our product to launch. We do not have the luxury of having someone with 10 years experience who only knows Java. If something needed to be done, someone had to do it. If we did not have the skills in the group, we had to learn them.
The critical factor for success in a startup is not 10 year of experience in one narrowly defined technical specialty. Specialization is for insects. The most important characteristics for effectiveness in a startup is the ability to learn and the capacity for getting things done. This is one of the key differences between working in a startup and working in a larger company. In a startup you have to do your own marketing, sales, programming, interface design... Everything needs to be done and it is an expensive luxury to have a person specialized in each area that is required.
" That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few."
"That's one way to work for free that will greatly enhance your value to potential employers. Start a blog, talk about your experiences with Rails, promote your open-source projects, etc. You'll soon find paid work coming your way."
If you want to be poor for the rest of your life and at the mercy of an employer, this is probably a good strategy. Instead of attempting to make yourself more appealing for sale to your bourgeoisie overloads you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for.
I have a friend who is working on some awesome iphone games and could use someone with experience with OOP design patterns. He would be willing to split revenue generated by the applications. Right now he is doing Objective-C development for the iphone (easy to pick up).
The android platform is going to be a huge opportunity in a few years, but the iphone is still the largest app store market, so that is what he has been concentrating on. Mobile development is an awesome opportunity and a very good area to develop experience in.
Everyone I have spoken to that has built a successful company has told me that their ability to manage the long term interests of their company was impaired by losing control of their board of directors.
If Mark Zuckerberg did not have control of his board, the company would have been sold to Yahoo for just under a billion dollars, where Facebook would have died. The Yahoo executives wanted to "Nascar up the site". It would not be a 30 billion dollar dollar company today if the board had been investor controlled.
The reason Friedster failed was that the company was managed from the board of directors by investors which did not use their product. The founders of Friendster were screaming at the board of directors that the website took 40 seconds to load, but the board was more concerned with expanding into new markets and adding features, rather than solving the scalability issues the company was facing. Myspace copied Friendster, solved the scalability issues and dominated until Facebook introduced the feed and notification mechanism and took the college demographic.
If you want to build a long term success like Google, you have to be in a position to ignore your investor's short term desire to improve the company's financials by sacrificing long term growth. The quickest way to increase your margins is to reduce investment in the future.
Most of Google's costs were from their consuming facing search product. Almost all of Google's revenues were from enterprise search. Dropping consumer facing search would have improved Google's financials for sale or IPO. Everyone at the time believed that search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the management team did not have board control, the decisions that would have been forced on the company would had led Google to a different, much grimmer corporate destiny.
The management team at Google believed strongly in the future of internet search and the growth of online advertising. They saw the potential of using search queries to target advertisements and that search engines were uniquely positioned to monetize lead generation; at a time when search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the company had cut its loss centers and focused on its profit centers, the company would not have been as successful as it is today. The operating autonomy of Google's management team was critical to Google's long term success.
I do not care what Paul Buchheit says. Eric Schmidt has on several occasions discussed the advantages of Google's ownership structure and how it enabled Google to ignore outside influences and focus on the long term success of the company. If Paul Buchheit disagrees with the CEO of Google about the importance of Google's ownership structure and the operational autonomy of the management team, then its unfortunate.