Entrepreneurship – Page 137 – artdiamondblog.com

Key to Google: “Both Larry and Sergey Were Montessori Kids”

(p. 121) [Marissa Mayer] conceded that to an outsider, Google’s new-business process might indeed look strange. Google spun out projects like buckshot, blasting a spray and using tools and measurements to see what it hit. And sometimes it did try ideas that seemed ill suited or just plain odd. Finally she burst out with her version of the corporate Rosebud. “You can’t understand Google,” she said, “unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”
“Montessori” refers to schools based on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue what interested them.
(p. 122) “It’s really ingrained in their personalities,” she said. “To ask their own questions, do their own things. To disrespect authority. Do something because it makes sense, not because some authority figure told you. In Montessori school you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do it that afternoon, not because the teacher said so. This is really baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems. They’re always asking ‘Why should it be like that?’ It’s the way their brains were programmed early on.”

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: bracketed name added.)

For Innovator It Is Better to Use Wealth to Innovate than to Donate

“Steve Jobs, a founder of Apple, has focused on his work to improve the lives of millions of people through technology.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The column quoted below, written before Steve Jobs’ death, asks an important question: should an innovative entrepreneur be a prominent philanthropist? I believe that innovative entrepreneurs can often do the most good by using their wealth to innovate rather than to donate.

(p. B1) Steve Jobs is a genius. He is an innovator. A visionary. He is perhaps the most beloved billionaire in the world.

Surprisingly, there is one thing that Mr. Jobs is not, at least not yet: a prominent philanthropist.
Despite accumulating an estimated $8.3 billion fortune through his holdings in Apple and a 7.4 percent stake in Disney (through the sale of Pixar), there is no public record of Mr. Jobs giving money to charity. He is not a member of the Giving Pledge, the organization founded by Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates to persuade the nation’s wealthiest families to pledge to give away at least half their fortunes. (He declined to participate, according to people briefed on the matter.) Nor is there a hospital wing or an academic building with his name on it.
None of this is meant to judge Mr. Jobs. I have long been a huge admirer of Mr. Jobs and consider him the da Vinci of our time.
. . .
(p. B4) . . . Mr. Jobs has always been upfront about where he has chosen to focus. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 1993 , he said, “Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful … that’s what matters to me.”

For the full commentary, see:
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN. “DEALBOOK COLUMN; The Mystery of Steve Jobs’s Public Giving.” The New York Times (Tues., AUGUST 30, 2011): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs added; ellipsis within last paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date AUGUST 29, 2011.)

Frank Lloyd Wright Loved Cars

“In the early 1920s, Wright bought a 1929 Cord L-29, which he praised for its sensible front-wheel drive. Besides, “It looked becoming to my houses,” he wrote in his book “An Autobiography.” He seemed to have a special bond with the Cord. “The feeling comes to me that the Cord should be heroic in this autobiography somewhere,” he wrote.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 9) Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect whose birth in 1867 preceded the gasoline-powered automobile’s by about 20 years, was an early adopter of the internal-combustion engine and an auto aficionado all his life.
He was also eerily prophetic in understanding how the car would transform the American landscape, and his designs reflect this understanding. Wright often designed both for and around automobiles, and his masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, owes its most distinctive feature, the spiral of its rotunda, to his love for the automobile.
. . .
Wright was seduced by the combination of beauty, power and speed, whether powered by hay or by gas. He owned horses, and his first car, a yellow Model K Stoddard-Dayton roadster, was the same model that in 1909 won the very first automobile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Called the Yellow Devil by his neighbors, this was a 45-horsepower car capable of going 60 miles an hour. Wright and his sons seemed to enjoy that horsepower with abandon: “Dad was kept busy paying fines,” his son John observed. So enamored was Wright of his automobile that he installed gas pumps in the garage of his home and studio in Oak Park, Ill.
. . .
In the early 1920s, Wright owned a custom-built Cadillac and later bought a 1929 Cord L-29, which he praised for its sensible front-wheel drive. Besides, “It looked becoming to my houses,” he wrote in his book “An Autobiography.” He seemed to have a special bond with the Cord. “The feeling comes to me that the Cord should be heroic in this autobiography somewhere,” he wrote.
Wright’s Cord can be seen today at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Ind.

For the full story, see:
INGRID STEFFENSEN. “Frank Lloyd Wright: The Auto as Architect’s Inspiration.” The New York Times, SportsSunday Section (Sun., August 9, 2009): 9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date August 6, 2009 and the title “The Auto as Architect’s Inspiration.” There are some small differences between the print and online versions, although I think the sentences quoted above are the same in both.)

Wright’s autobiography, mentioned above, is:
Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Horizon Press, 1977.

When Google Earned a Profit, Sergey Brin “Felt Like We Had Built a Real Business”

(p. 94) . . . , Google was reaping rewards, and 2002 was its first profitable year. “That’s really satisfying,” Brin said at the time. “Honestly, when we were still in the dot-com boom days, I felt like a schmuck. I had an Internet start-up– so did everybody else. It was unprofitable, like everybody else’s, and how hard is that? But when we became profitable, I felt like we had built a real business.”

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Why “Experts” Censor Their Views to Conform to the Consensus

Source of book image: http://thesituationist.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/irving-janis-groupthink.jpg?w=197&h=290

(p. 5) In his classic 1972 book, “Groupthink,” Irving L. Janis, the Yale psychologist, explained how panels of experts could make colossal mistakes. People on these panels, he said, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.

For the full commentary, see:
ROBERT J. SHILLER. “ECONOMIC VIEW; Challenging the Crowd in Whispers, Not Shouts.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., November 2, 2008): 5.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 1, 2008.)

The reference for the second, and last, edition of the Janis book, is:
Janis, Irving L. Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. 2nd (pb) ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 1982.

Yahoo Execs Complained that Google Did Yahoo Searches too Well

(p. 45) Even though Google never announced when it refreshed its index, there would invariably be a slight rise in queries around the world soon after the change was implemented. It was as if the global subconscious realized that there were fresher results available.
The response of Yahoo’s users to the Google technology, though, was probably more conscious. They noticed that search was better and used it more. “It increased traffic by, like, 50 percent in two months,” Manber recalls of the switch to Google. But the only comment he got from Yahoo executives was complaints that people were searching too much and they would have to pay higher fees to Google.
But the money Google received for providing search was not the biggest benefit. Even more valuable was that it now had access to many more users and much more data. It would be data that took Google search to the next level. The search behavior of users, captured and encapsulated in the logs that could be analyzed and mined, would make Google the ultimate learning machine.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Silicon Valley May Be Insulated from the Jobs Ordinary People Need to Get Done

A long while ago I read somewhere that in his prime Bill Gates deliberately tested Microsoft software on the limited hardware that mainstream customers could afford, rather than on the cutting edge hardware he himself could easily afford. I thought that this gave an important clue to Gates’ and Microsoft’s success.
Christensen and Raynor (2003) suggest that the successful entrepreneur will think hard about what jobs ordinary people want to get done, but are having difficulty doing.
The passages quoted below suggest that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are insulated from ordinary life, and so may need to work harder at learning what the real problems are.

(p. B5) Engineers tend to move to the Bay Area because of the opportunity to get together with other engineers and, just maybe, create a great company, Mr. Smith said. But in a region that has the highest concentration of tech workers in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the bars, restaurants and other haunts of entrepreneurs can be an echo chamber. The result can be a focus on solutions for mundane problems.
. . .
. . . too often, says Jason Pontin, the editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review, . . . start-ups are solving “fake problems that don’t actually create any value.” Mr. Pontin knows a thing or two about companies that aren’t exactly reaching for the stars. From 1996 to 2002, he was the editor of Red Herring, a magazine in San Francisco that chronicled the region’s dot-com boom and eventual collapse.

For the full commentary, see:
NICK BILTON. “Disruptions: The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley.” The New York Times (Mon., June 3, 2013): B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2013.)

The Christensen and Raynor book that I mention above, is:
Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

How to Win the Nobel Prize with Dyslexia

“HER TURN; Dr. Carol W. Greider is a researcher at Johns Hopkins.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT interview quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) Q. Did you always want to be a biologist?

A. My parents were scientists. But I wasn’t the sort of child who did science fairs. One of the things I was thinking about today is that as a kid I had dyslexia. I had a lot of trouble in school and was put into remedial classes. I thought that I was stupid.
Q. That must have hurt.
A. Sure. Yes. It was hard to overcome (p. D3) that. I kept thinking of ways to compensate. I learned to memorize things very well because I just couldn’t spell words. So later when I got to take classes like chemistry and anatomy where I had to memorize things, it turned out I was very good at that.
I never planned a career. I had these blinders on that got me through a lot of things that might have been obstacles. I just went forward. It’s a skill that I had early on that must have been adaptive. I enjoyed biology in high school and that brought me to a research lab at U.C. Santa Barbara. I loved doing experiments and I had fun with them. I realized this kind of problem-solving fit my intellectual style. So in order to continue having fun, I decided to go to graduate school at Berkeley. It was there that I went to Liz Blackburn’s lab, where telomeres were being studied.

For the full interview, see:
CLAUDIA DREIFUS. “A CONVERSATION WITH CAROL W. GREIDER; On Winning a Nobel Prize in Science.” The New York Times (Tues., October 13, 2009): D1 & D3.
(Note: bold in original; questions capitalized as in print version.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date October 12, 2009.)

Yahoo Valued “Marketing Gimmicks” More than Search Speed

(p. 44) Google had struck a deal to handle all the search traffic of Yahoo, one of the biggest portals on the web.
The deal–announced on June 26, 2000–was a frustrating development to the head of Yahoo’s search team, Udi Manber. He had been arguing that Yahoo should develop its own search product (at the time, it was licensing technology from Inktomi), but his bosses weren’t interested. Yahoo’s executives, led by a VC-approved CEO named Timothy Koogle (described in a BusinessWeek cover story as “The Grown-up Voice of Reason at Yahoo”), instead were devoting their attention to branding–marketing gimmicks such as putting the purple corporate logo on the Zamboni machine that swept the ice between periods of San Jose Sharks hockey games. “I had six people working on my search team,” Manber said. “I couldn’t get the seventh. This was a company that had thousands of people. I could not get the seventh.” Since Yahoo wasn’t going to develop its own search, Manber had the task of finding the best one to license.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: italics in original.)

Redundancy Allowed Google to Function with Cheap and Failure-Prone Hard Drives

(p. 42) . . . as the web kept growing, Google added more machines–by the end of 1999, there were eighty machines involved in the crawl (out of a total of almost three thousand Google computers at that time)–and the likelihood that something would break increased dramatically. Especially since Google made a point of buying what its engineers referred to as “el cheapo” equipment. Instead of commercial units that carefully processed and checked information, Google would buy discounted consumer models without built-in processes to protect the integrity of data.
As a stopgap measure, the engineers had implemented a scheme where the indexing data was stored on different hard drives. If a machine went bad, everyone’s pager would start buzzing, even if it was the middle of the night, and they’d barrel into the office immediately to stop the crawl, copy the data, and change the configuration files. “This happened every few days, and it basically stopped everything and was very painful,” says Sanjay Ghemawat, one of the DEC research wizards who had joined Google.
. . .
(p. 43) The experience led to an ambitious revamp of the way the entire Google infrastructure dealt with files. “I always had wanted to build a file system, and it was pretty clear that this was something we were going to have to do,” says Ghemawat, who led the team. Though there had previously been systems that handled information distributed over multiple files, Google’s could handle bigger data loads and was more nimble at running full speed in the face of disk crashes– which it had to be because, with Google’s philosophy of buying supercheap components, failure was the norm. “The main idea was that we wanted the file system to automate dealing with failures, and to do that, the file system would keep multiple copies and it would make new copies when some copy failed,” says Ghemawat.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipses added.)

To Page and Brin Search Speed “Was Like Motherhood, and Scale Was Apple Pie”

(p. 37) The average search at that time, Hölzle recalls, took three and a half seconds. Considering that speed was one of the core values of Page and Brin– it was like motherhood, and scale was apple pie– this was a source of distress for the founders. “Basically during the middle of the day we were maxed out,” says Hölzle. “Nothing was happening for some users, because it would just never get a page basically back. It was all about scalability, performance improvements.” Part of the problem was that Page and Brin had written the system in what Hölzle calls “university code,” a nice way of saying amateurish.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.