Google-style "craziness": moving calmly between business and dream-making

Liu Jia

"Investors have always worried: you guys are spending too much money on these crazy things."

Many "great" companies, for this reason, eventually transformed into a "big" company. However, one company resisted this pressure and continued to indulge in "crazy" innovation.

"But these (crazy) things have now become our most inspiring products, such as YouTube, Chrome, Android. If you don't do crazy things, you'll make mistakes," said Larry Page, co-founder and CEO of Google, in an interview.

Why is Google so fascinating?

According to the domestic independent tech blog Moonlight Blog, there has never been a company like Google, and there may never be one in the future. Because this is not even a business model. "It can mobilize enormous resources with almost no profit pressure. It's powerful yet flexible. It never respects the existing business models of the market —— in a sense, whenever Google enters any market, it is a tragedy for the existing kingpins of that market."

How does the drive for innovation persist?

Someone once asked Li Kaifu, who left Google to start his own venture, what aspects of Google culture he would transplant to Innovation Works?

Li Kaifu's answer was: "Google-style equal innovation, top talent, internet culture, real-time feedback."

Looking back, history is full of creative companies. However, when these companies grow larger, their drive for innovation gradually disappears, eventually becoming a company driven by commercial value.

What makes Google different?

"Whether or not we can continue to find world-class talent." This is seen by Google as the biggest bottleneck for the company's future growth.

The bizarre interview questions at Google have stumped many high achievers: "Do you swim faster in water or syrup?", "How would you weigh the weight of your head?", "How many golf balls can fit inside a school bus?" These questions, unrelated to work and without a single correct answer, often test the candidate's thought process, allowing interviewers to assess their creativity in problem-solving.

Its recruitment ads were even once posted in major subway stations across Silicon Valley. On long billboards, simply written was "(the first ten-digit prime number found in the series of 'e') .com", without the company name or any advertising slogans. Through this move alone, Google successfully selected those filled with curiosity and exploratory spirit from millions of people. And after the subsequent marathon of crazy riddles, the "survivors" who managed to enter the Google lab webpage and successfully submit their resumes were elites chosen from thousands.

In addition to attracting top talent, innovation also comes from bottom-up innovative forces, especially through giving employees ample authority. Google’s approach is: "Allow engineers to spend 20% of their time determining their research direction based on personal interest."

In September this year, Amit Sood, founder of the Google Art Project, came to China and told reporters that this project was initiated during his 20% time.

Amit Sood said that he had a great passion for art and had always been thinking about how to connect technology with art. Later, he came up with the idea of creating an online platform for visiting and appreciating art. Now this project has over 200 partners and 48,000 works online. Based on the Art Project, Google established the Cultural Institute, which includes the World Wonders Project, historical sites, etc., all of which have been preserved and spread through technological means, and this is a completely non-profit project.

"This is just Google's support and investment in non-profit innovative projects. It's not hard to imagine the explosive power that can be generated when such a group of people apply the same or even more passion to other projects," commented Li Qi (a pseudonym), an employee of Google China, to the reporter.

In his view, the open and free innovation culture directly affects the way Google thinks about new products and technologies.

Li Qi said, "In Google, some teams hold meetings requiring coordination of times across various global offices. They can specifically design a program for the meeting itself, using technology to solve this problem. For example, a department in Google previously complained about having to handle a lot of emails daily, so an engineer designed an automated email reply system. It wasn’t a standard reply like ‘Hello, your email has been received’, but rather an artificial intelligence email reply system. Like a robot, it could read the content of the email, process customer requests, and then respond."

In his view, Google's success today is absolutely not accidental, nor is it solely due to an individual or acquisition, or even a specific project. "It's because of such a group of people, and the corporate culture they identify with."

Google's "moonshot ambition"

In the past two years, Google was once overshadowed by Apple and Facebook, and also went through a growth bottleneck period. But in fact, this company that has integrated innovation into its bloodline has quietly prepared for the next ten years.

The answers are hidden in Google's list of crazy creative projects. Some projects currently appear to require large investments and are difficult to truly commercialize. These crazy projects are mostly included in Google's high-risk, high-reward "moonshot plan" (project code name), such as driverless cars, WiFi balloons, offshore wind power stations, and even space mining businesses, handled by the Google X department.

Page also likes to describe Google as "a company with moonshot ambitions," "I'm not suggesting putting all the money into risky projects, but we must allocate resources equivalent to what regular companies use for product development, and spend them on things with long-term impact and greater ambition, beyond the imagination of ordinary people, like going to the moon." He said.

Now, Google's self-driving cars have already traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on the roads of California, Nevada, and Florida. It has already replaced Page in picking up many guests visiting Google, without ever having an accident.

Its latest adventure is "escaping death." On September 18th this year, Google disclosed a project called "Calico" and established a new company focused on extending lifespan.

Page frankly admitted that he doesn't have much professional knowledge about this type of technology, but in Silicon Valley, there is a view: as long as science and technology can be freely applied, there are no unsolvable problems.

In the eyes of investors, Google's wild dreams have sparked considerable controversy.

Analyst Colin Gillis (Colin Gillis) of investment firm BGC Partners believes, "Although it seems like losing money to gain attention, surprisingly, they're doing pretty well. When evaluating Apple, we might say, 'What's their next round of growth points?' But when talking about Google, we say 'These markets have good prospects in the future, and they've already started.'"

However, some people question whether projects like Google's driverless car and Google Glass, though ambitious and boosting stock prices, have proven commercial potential. Spending on these projects might negatively affect Google's profit margin. One analyst estimated that, excluding traffic acquisition costs, Google's gross profit margin for the latest quarter was 34.9%, down from 37.2% in the previous quarter.

Page once said that there are always such debates within Google: "We have money, we have people, why can't we do more? You might say Apple only does very few things, and it works for them. But I find it unsatisfying."

The increase of $100 billion in Google's market value during Page's tenure perhaps proves that Google, currently balancing between commerce and dreams, is still navigating smoothly.