What do Jaiku, Dodgeball, Grandcentral and Feedburner have in common? They’re all companies that Google acquired and didn’t do much with ever since.
From an outsiders’ perspective, it is pretty odd that Google is acquiring good ideas and businesses and letting them fade slowly. It is easy to assess why Google acquired these companies (for the talent, technology or just for the modjo), but not having a structure to deal with the new intellectual property seems a bit clumsy, particularly coming from people we’re used to seeing excel when it comes to launching products.
What I’d love to see? Google integrating some of this acquired IP into their core offerings. Dodgeball, Jaiku and Orkut should live together. Feedburner and Google Analytics were made for eachother. Grandcentral would be ace tied to “Google Apps for your domain”. I wouldn’t be bummed if they actually brought all these companies down if their functionality were to appear elsewhere within the Google universe.
I’m pretty sure there’s people at Google who can build and implement this strategy. But please stop leaving these things (some of them with quite a chunk of users) in the acquisition closet.
If you can only read one article during the weekend, make sure you read Jeffrey Kalmikoff’s post on working smarter and harder. No wonder Threadless is such a successful business.
I escape 9-5 by working 8 to 8. I work weekends. When I’m not working, I’m thinking about work. Sound bad? Maybe we have different ideas of what work is. Work has no negative connotations to me. It’s equally rewarding as it is inspiring; equally exciting as it is relaxing. I always have my eye on the prize: making things better all the time for our company, for our community and for our customers. It’s not that I have no life, hustlers are expert life-multitaskers. They recognize that ideas or opportunities can arise at any time, and they’re always prepared.
Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I posted another quote on the same topic.
Back in 2007 I was in the bay area visiting a company to check out a few upcoming products, and being that I was staying with Mike at the Techcrunch HQ, I took the opportunity to visit a couple of startups like the good old days. Luckily for me, YCombinator was hosting a dinner with their companies and they invited me and Nick Gonzales to come over for it – which we did. It turned out to be a great dinner[1].
I took the opportunity to ask Paul Graham for advice on something that was troubling me at the time. A little context: WBS had two main sources of income – products and consulting. Goplan was growing steadily (it became profitable a week after launching) and our consulting business was doing extremely well. I had growing questions of where to focus our efforts.
So I asked Paul what he thought we should do – focus on our products, or our consulting business. It was now two years ago so I can’t remember Paul’s exact words, but his answer went something like this:
“It is pretty obvious to me. You have a growing, successful product and a team that has proven it can deliver. Why spend time working on the ideas of others when you can do something great with what you have today, and worry about your consulting in the future? You have a great opportunity right now.”
I left YCombinator that day with those words in my mind and I remember them to this day. I often get into conversations on whether to work on one’s ideas or work for others (be that as a consultant or just joining the ranks of a major company) – and although I don’t quote PG on those conversations, my advice has always been the same. Work on the things you are passionate about[2] – particularly while you can afford to do it.
Foot notes
[1]: Three highlights from that evening: meeting the Justin.TV guys, who were then just a couple of guys with a neat idea and weird headgear; Trevor Blackwell’s robotics lab (at the YCombinator HQ), still ingrained in my memory as the coolest place on earth (homegrown Segway!); Jessica Livingston, kind enough to give me a signed copy of her book Founders at Work (which you should read if you’re an entrepreneur) before it went out on the shelves.
[2]: This was actually one of my new years’s resolutions – to only work on things I’m passionate about. It’s been working just fine thus far, and I’m not alone in this.