Management Papers

2004 Founders’ IPO Letter

Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. Throughout Google’s evolution as a privately held company, we have managed Google differently. We have also emphasized an atmosphere of creativity and challenge, which has helped us provide unbiased, accurate and free access to information for those who rely on us around the world.

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Youtube represents an interesting seed stage investment opportunity. The company’s goal is to become the primary outlet of user-generated video content on the internet, and to allow anyone to upload, share, and browse this content.

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The smaller the team the better the collaboration. Collaboration is also very important as the software releases are moving faster than ever. And a team’s ability to deliver the software can be a differentiating factor for your organization against your competition. Image a situation in which a new product feature needs to be released or a bug needs to be fixed you want this to happen as quickly as possible so you can have a smaller go-to-market timed. This is also important as you don’t want the transformation to be a slow-moving process rather than an agile approach where waves of changes start to make an impact.

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In midst of the great financial crisis, something odd happened. Volkswagen, the German carmaker, became the biggest company in the world. For one, brief day.

Looking back a decade, as many have recently, you’d be forgiven for thinking the worst asset to own was a US investment bank or mortgage originator. But it was nothing compared to being short the Wolfsburg-based business.

Exactly 10 years (and 48 hours) later, here’s how it happened.

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Because i think it may be of some help to you in putting through out recommendation for additional men for the promotion department, I am outlining briefly below the duties and responsibilities of the brand men.

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But first, some theory:

If you look at a broad cross-section of startups — say, 30 or 40 or more; enough to screen out the pure flukes and look for patterns — two obvious facts will jump out at you.

First obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of success — some of those startups are insanely successful, some highly successful, many somewhat successful, and quite a few of course outright fail.

Second obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of caliber and quality for the three core elements of each startup — team, product, and market.

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After 20-plus years, Google remains a company where anything can happen. Our “healthy disregard for the impossible”—as Larry and Sergey like to call it—is still what gets us out of bed every morning and why we love pushing the boundaries of technology to solve even the toughest problems for our users.

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We believe those central tenets are still true today. The company is not conventional and continues to make ambitious bets on new technology, especially with our Alphabet structure.

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I have received hundreds of emails from iPhone customers who are upset about Apple dropping the price of iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale. After reading every one of these emails, I have some observations and conclusions.

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A Good Product Manager plays critical role in a successful product. A successful product is the highest impact contribution that anyone can make in the PD organization. In fact, the number one criteria for selecting a Vice President is the candidate’s track record (or lack thereof) of successful products that become profitable businesses for their company.

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Steve Jobs – Thoughts on Flash

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

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March 8, 1960
I’m glad to have this opportunity to get together with you and discuss how each of us can do our job more efficiently because as the company grows I think this is going to be crucial in determining whether we are able to continue to grow and keep an efficient organization and maintain the character of our company which we think is important.

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Here’s my current cut. Steve

1. 2011 Strategy – SJ
– who are we?
– headcount, average age, …
– VP count, senior promotions in last year
– percent new membership at this meeting
– what do we do?

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P&G has sent thousands of trained marketers into the broader world, and the system and culture those marketers take with them have largely shaped the marketing landscape.

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As we begin the new year, I strongly believe we are entering a period of great danger and even greater uncertainty. Events are unfolding within and without the movie industry that are extremely threatening to our studio.

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Hello there,

There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge.

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Controlled experiments, also called randomized experiments and A/B tests, have had a profound influence on multiple fields, including medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, and advertising. Through randomization and proper design, experiments allow establishing causality scientifically, which is why they are the gold standard in drug tests. In software development, multiple techniques are used to define product requirements; controlled experiments provide a valuable way to assess the impact of new features on customer behavior.

Engineering Papers

First read one of How to Read an Academic Article by Peter Klein or How to Read a Paper by S. Keshav, and then jump into this list of recommended papers:

• Bell System Technical Journal, 1922-1983
• The Google File System
• Microsoft Research
• Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
• MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab Publications
• On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services
• No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
• Raft: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm
• Hints for Computer System Design
• Big Ball of Mud
• Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing
• 2015: Continuous Pipelines at Google
• 2015: High-Availability at Massive Scale: Building Google’s Data Infrastructure for Ads