• Pete Bucheit, Pete Kooman and David Liep.
• PB was employee 23 at Google and built Gmail, PK was an early PM that build optimizely, David was acquired by google and then built out Google Photos.

Googles business model is one of the greatest of all time

• So much depends on the original business model of a product. Google’s first products created firehoses of money.
• Lack of structure in the beginning is a great gift, but later this became extreme at google
• Google’s (lack of) structure and strategies became a disease of having too much money.
• There was an ethos of let 1000 flowers bloom - let smart people go and do what they want.
• Google founders didn’t give much direction beyond the company level OKRs at the 1000 person level. You generally decide on what to work on on and there wasn’t much accountability so people didn’t listen often.
• Each engineer would have a project on something they wanted to build. Often a tech lead. People would lead little dominions.
• Paul Bucheit
  • I was just told. “Make an email thing”

Performance review

• You don’t need to bother with performance reviews - you know who the good people are. They’re the ones you’d pick for your next project.
• There were no performance reviews, it was more: I wanna work with that person / not that person - that’s how it really work
• Useless people are worse than useless, because

There are no useless people, only worse-than-useless people, because useless people will do the wrong thing, just at the moment you need them to do the right thing.

• Google has a slow launch speed. Paul B started feeling drained coming back from 7m of paternity leave, he was given a misconfigured laptop (the tech team didn’t deem that an issue), then his code would take a month to deploy.
• PB liked launching / hate not launching