Entrepreneurial Growth of GOOGLE

By: JAY-AR C. DIMACULANGAN

DBM student
• In January 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google as a
research project for their PhD studies at Stanford University
(Google Milestones 2013).
• At that time, conventional search engines ranked search
results by counting the number of search terms on the web
page.
• Page and Brin introduced a search engine with a better
mechanism that was based on the analysis of relationships
between websites (Page et al 1999).
• They named the new search engine BackRub. This research
project became the foundation of Google Inc. By September
1998, Google was incorporated as a privately-held company.
• In June 2000, Google was recognized as the
world’s largest search engine. By 2002, Google
earned several awards including Best Search
Feature and Best Design awards. The company
gained success by continuously enhancing its
products and services. The company also
launched a free email account, called Gmail
(Google Milestones 2013).
• Google has achieved great success in growing its
internet-related products and services. In line with
this, it has acquired several small entrepreneurial
ventures like Keyhole Inc, YouTube, Double Click,
Grand Central, Aardvark and On2 Technologies
(Google Milestones 2013). In recent years, Google
has become a significant player in the telecom
industry with its development of the Android
mobile system. The company is also increasing its
hardware business through its partnerships with
major electronics manufacturers.
• The company's rapid growth since incorporation
has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and
partnerships beyond Google's core search engine
(Google Search).
• It offers services for various benefits:

Work and productivity: Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides),
Email: Gmail
Scheduling and time management: Google Calendar
Cloud storage: Google Drive
Instant messaging and video chat : Duo, Hangouts
Language translation: Google Translate
Mapping and navigation :Google Maps, Waze, Google Earth, Street View,
Video sharing :YouTube,
Note-taking :Google Keep
and photo organizing and editing : Google Photos.
• The company leads the development of
the Android mobile operating system, the Google
Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a lightweight
operating system based on the Chrome browser.
 Corporate Mission
• Google Inc has promoted its corporate mission of ‘to
organize the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful.’ The company seeks
to empower individuals by providing its customers
with the right products and/or services at the right
time and by encouraging its employees to be
innovative and productive. The company’s human
resource policies are vertically integrated with this
vision.
 Organizational Culture
• Google is fundamentally built upon a culture of openness and
sharing of ideas and opinions. This is primarily influenced by
the company’s beginnings as an internet startup company. In
line with this principle, the company has encouraged its
employees to ask questions directly to top executives about
various company issues (Google 2013).
• Google is a dynamic company wherein everyone’s ideas are
respected and heard.
• In a comparative analysis of Google vis-à-vis other information
technology companies, it was observed that Google has a
more employee-friendly working environment. The company
also provides flexibility both in terms of working hours and
work place in order to foster creativity and the flow of ideas
(Business Teacher 2011).
 Organizational Culture
• Google’s organizational culture is built upon
intrapreneurship.
• Employees are encouraged to be proactive, self-
motivated and action-oriented, with the goal of
developing new and innovative products or services They
are motivated through the challenge of creating
something new rather than waiting for their managers to
provide them with next deadline or a prescribed project
proposal. The vision of Google is to sustain the same
level of devotion and enthusiasm among its employees
as Larry Page and Sergey Brin themselves had when they
were conceptualizing Google at Stanford University
(Hammond 2004).
 Human Resource as a Strategic Partner
• The company promotes its human resource department
as a strategic partner of employees. Google values
innovativeness and creativity in its employees.
• Innovation is very important for the long-term success
and future growth of the company. To achieve this, the
company encourages new ideas from employees and
provides rewards/incentives to motivate them (Forster
2005).
• Furthermore, the company makes an effort to create a
workplace with an atmosphere that is conducive to
fostering creativity, imagination, and innovativeness.
 Its Growth
• In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto,
California,which is home to several prominent Silicon
Valley technology start-ups.
• The next year, Google began selling advertisements
associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's
initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search
engine.[To maintain an uncluttered page design,
advertisements were solely text-based.In June 2000, it was
announced that Google would become the default search
engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites
at the time, replacing Inktomi.
• .
 Its Growth
• In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company
leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600
Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The
complex became known as the Googleplex, a play on the
word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol zeroes.
• Three years later, Google bought the property from SGI for
$319 million. By that time, the name "Google" had found its way
into everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to
the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford
English Dictionary, denoted as: "to use the Google search engine
to obtain information on the Internet". Additionally, in 2001
Google's Investors felt the need to have a strong internal
management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the
Chairman and CEO of Google
 INNOVATION OF GOOGLE

• A company’s innovation potential can be defined as the

combination of its human, intellectual, physical, market,
leveraged, and financial resources.
 RESOURCES

• Google has more than 20,000 employees spread across

several functions such as engineering, operations,
marketing, and sales. In addition to expertise in their
field, all Googlers bring to the company their individual
passions and interests, which play a key role in driving
innovation AND GROWTH.
 INTELLECTUAL

• The company possesses significant knowhow and

intellectual property in many areas—most notably
in crawling, storing, indexing, organizing, and
searching data on a massive scale and with an
extremely fast response time. Physical. Google has a
network of datacenters as well as a variety of
custom, open source, and commercial hardware
and software to harness this computing power and
make it easily and seamlessly accessible to both
customerfacing products and internal tools.
 MARKET

• Hundreds of millions of people use Google’s

products each day. These products generate
revenue as well as goodwill that is useful to the
company when it needs to try out, and get feedback
on, its latest innovations.
 LEVERAGED

• Google fosters an ecosystem that allows other

companies to prosper by providing additional value
and content on top of its services. By lowering the
impedance between itself and the outside
community, Google facilitates a symbiotic
relationship that enables and accelerates innovation
for all.
 FINANCIAL

• The company has the ability to invest significant

capital in many speculative projects and innovative
ideas.
ENTREPRENEURIAL GROWTH AND INNOVATION

• Google believes that the best way to stay on top of the market and
remain competitive over the long term is to promote, foster, and
invest in entrepreneurial innovation in all areas of the
company.
• The ability to drive, and participate in, innovation is not limited to
a select few PhDs working in designated research labs—it is open
to all employees.
• Further, Google’s entrepreneurial innovation model mimics, with
some obvious and necessary limits, the experience that
entrepreneurs would have in a start-up: fighting for funding and
resources, dealing with competing products, and, if successful,
earning significant financial rewards for their efforts. Two core
beliefs drive Google’s approach to entrepreneurial innovation.
ENTREPRENEURIAL GROWTH AND INNOVATION

• While Google invests heavily in maintaining, supporting,

and continually improving already established products
such as Search, Ads, and Gmail, it realizes that to ensure
long-term growth and success, it must also commit
resources to innovation in several areas. Schmidt made
that clear in 2009 when he said that “innovation is the
technological precondition for growth.”
ENTREPRENEURIAL GROWTH AND INNOVATION
• Expect innovation from every employee.
• Google strongly believes that innovation can come from any employee
at any time.
• “We prefer [our engineers] to run rampant,” Schmidt explained in 2005.
“The cleverest ideas don’t come from the leaders, but rather from the
leaders listening and encouraging and kind of creating a discussion.”
• In his 2009 commencement address at Carnegie Mellon University,
Schmidt said, “You cannot plan innovation, you cannot plan invention.
All you can do is try very hard to be in the right place and be ready.”
• What does it mean to “try very hard to be in the right place and be
ready,” and what does that take?
• For Google, it means organizing the entire company to foster and
support “unplanned” innovation and entrepreneurship
8 PILLARS OF GOOGLE INNOVATION

• How does a company like Google continue to grow

exponentially while still staying innovative?

• Susan Wojcicki, Google's Senior Vice President of

Advertising, discusses some of the processes and
principles in place to make sure that the company
doesn't get bogged down in the past as it keeps moving
forward.
8 PILLARS OF GOOGLE INNOVATION

• Have a mission that matters

• Think big but start small
• Strive for continual innovation, not instant perfection
• Look for ideas everywhere
• Share everything
• Spark with imagination, fuel with data
• Be a platform
• Never fail to fail