The overarching issue was that they tried to do big
company practices in the move fast and break things startup
style. For every well-intentioned move toward being a
proper company they managed to screw it up by trying to
inject startup-style speed and improvisation.
What would have been a better way of handling the transition?
> What would have been a better way of handling the transition?
The problems all came from the top-down direction. Replacing the CEO with an experienced big company leader could have solved so many issues.
The CEO was good at founding startups and running small teams, but that’s all he really wanted to do. He was trying to run a big company like a small startup and actively fought big-company organization styles.
Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google don’t try to pretend they’re still startups. They embrace the fact that they’re a big company and they make it work. They’re not perfect, but it’s better than a slowly failing big company that can’t accept that change is necessary.
One of my big realizations as I've gotten more work experience is just how much momentum matters in business. Brand awareness along with existing customers and relationships is huge.
A big established company can get away with a shocking amount of incompetence for a really long time, while a very well run startup can easily fail.
Mostly because annexation of conquered territory is illegal. Without it at least Eastern Congo, possibly all of it, would be part of Rwanda. There are a lot of failed states in the world. They'd fail at defending themselves from a competent military too.
Agreed. It's sometimes hard to distinguish the things Google does that contributes to its success from the things Google can get away with (waste, etc.) because of its success.
Isn't that a conglomerate in a nutshell? "Our random incompetency averages with our random competency, such that we're able to avoid bankruptcy and remain a going concern longer than smaller, less diversified companies."
So much this. There is a very big difference between running a startup and a large / publicly traded company. There is no shame in a founder hiring a good ceo to manage the company after the startup phase. I worked for a company where they essentially grew through grit and insane hours and became established and went public. Then everything started going to hell. CEO was just not prepared to run a proper company and as a result constant production crashes, employee and customer churn. Company survives by constantly diluting and selling more shares now.
But that's also extremely risky, it's really not easy finding good CEOs and not easy to tell if one is going to be good or not (see Apple replacing Jobs in the 80s).
This. The things that get a start-up to IPO are not what make a successful company after IPO. Different leaders are needed, Google succeeded by bringing such a CEO on bord. It is hard to see companies on a good trajectory, from start up to mature public entity, fail due to these purely self inflicted things.
