When starting a tech business it’s traditional to think that you must have representatives from each of the various roles present at the beginning: the business person, the tech person, the marketing person, etc. There is a strong cult of opinion on what it takes to create a successful business and most of that opinion originates with the traditional business types.
You know: the men who wear expensive suits, fly all over the world and talk about mergers and acquisitions over cocktails as if their lifestyles were the only possible vector of success. Traditionally, good businesses are supposed to be difficult to create and maintain. You have to hire consultants, CFOs, COOs, and CSOs to make sure you’re enterprise-compliant. Your company must be publicly traded on the NYSE or NASDAQ and must pay out dividends to its investors. You should have press conferences on par with those of The White House and news releases that echo throughout the traditional TLA-branded media outlets. This is big business. Or it was anyway.
Then it was two graduate students in Silicon Valley who performed one of the largest, most ambitious and most successful power grabs in the history of technology. Google is based on the idea that more information, better technology and better people will bring a net positive effect into the industry, the market and the world. These guys flew in the face of tradition and proved explicitly that big business need be nothing more than a business…that’s big. Forget the suits, the cigars and the aged single malt; business is about creating things and engaging the market. Where there are new opportunities there will be new investments and new success. One of the most important ways in which this success was achieved at Google, though, is through the raw creative power of their engineers.
Never before in the history of software have the raw talent and intellect of engineers been put at the forefront of such a massive and successful movement. Google is brilliant software engineers. They have consistently challenged the conventional wisdom and empirically proved the soundness of their methods. Perhaps the most valuable contribution that Google has made to the software industry, though, is simply their Googliness. They have shown that the only essential part of a solid business is the brain — its creative workers. Business people, marketers and other support staff are certainly important to the growth and maintenance of the business, but creative workers are absolutely essential; there is no company without them.
Google’s strong culture and mindset carried them through many more nontraditional phases of growth, including their decidedly unorthodox public offering, investor relations, acquisitions and market interactions. Nearly ten years later they appear to be as strong as ever, charging ahead while the rest of the business world tries to keep up and carries a puzzled expression on its face. Google didn’t just accomplish their own goals in a novel way, they shed light on entirely new opportunities that no one had even considered.
We are already seeing the effects of this liberation with the latest batch up startups. Now it is acceptable to bring three brilliant hackers donning Star Trek attire in front of a VC firm for an investment plea. We’re definitely not past the point where those same VCs insist on installing a suited business guy to do sufficiently businessy things for those startups, but we’re certainly closer than we were in the first Internet boom. Regardless of the fate of this “boom” or the industry trends in the near future, it is clear that Google has left a fundamental mark on the world that will continue to manifest itself in technology for decades to come.
I’ll avoid the Soylent Green cliché and just say that business is people. Strong business is about the strong people you have at the core of the company, not how expensive your suit was or how many mergers you have consulted on. The future generation of entrepreneurs and creative thinkers need to take hold of the market alone and with the confidence that highly intelligent and skilled people working together in small condensed units can achieve extraordinary success without the prerequisites of Armani and Cuban cigars.