An Introduction to Google, the Company

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “Google is the most innovative company. They don’t have schedules, they treat their employees very well, it’s only for geniuses, they have foosball tables, and to top it off, no uniforms! That’s what it means to be a cutting-edge company in this millennial era!”

Many people, when they have the opportunity to meet a Mountain View employee, start to bombard them with questions about the benefits and how incredible it is to work “at a company like Google!” They begin to ask if it’s true that everything is “like in the movie”…

Google started like many other companies in the late 90s. Two nerds met while studying for their PhDs at Stanford University in California.

The project that brought them together was the development of an indexer.

To explain their project, imagine looking for a physical book in the library. The process is clear:

1. We go to the search section.
2. We look for the bibliographic card in alphabetical order.
3. We write down the key from the card.
4. We go to the relevant bookshelf.
5. We find the book using the code.
6. We open the book to the corresponding section.

What Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to do was not very far from this reality. This is how Google’s mission was born: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” in other words, to create a large Internet Page Indexer. Digital, instead of physical.

In retrospect, the idea was obviously good. Larry and Sergey knew it, but they weren’t the only ones. There were other companies doing the same thing: Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask, WebCrawler, among other less relevant ones. But then, what was the difference? What was the genius of these nerds? What made Google able to dominate the market, not only of digital indexers, but of the Internet?

At Google, there is a Modus Operandi that some call The Google Way of Working. This work methodology is often confused by most people with:

• The lack of:

• Schedules
• Cubicles
• Uniforms
• Or the existence of:
  • Foosball
  • Ping pong tables
  • Video games
  • Slides
  • Gyms
  • Greenhouses
  • Included food
  • Snacks

While it’s true that Google offers these benefits, they are decorations, not the foundation of the building. The Google Way of Working can be summarized in Objectives and Key Results.

• What is the objective of the project?
• How will the results be measured?

The truth is, beyond that, there is a certain creative freedom that allows you to function with the agility to deliver results in a disciplined manner, without being tied to a superior dictating what you have to do.

That doesn’t mean there’s no supervision, but the boss is there to unblock problems the employee couldn’t solve on their own, not as a dictator inspecting every move in detail. This is how we are going to manage this book: Based on the Objectives and Key Results methodology.

If you are reading these lines, it is surely due to one of two situations:

• You are curious to know how Google and its technology can help your company:
  • That you are looking to found.
  • That has already been founded and you are looking to take to the next level.
  • Where you are an employee and are looking to provide an opportunity for improvement.