This really depends what is driving you to start your own business and what you are passionate about.
Are you happy with a $2million revenue a year business, or do you want to be the next unicorn?
You might find a large problem to solve, but is it some thing your are passionate about? Or perhaps you love selling antique nail clippers for example, which is probably a very small market, but you love doing it and supplementing your day job income.
Find a problem, decide if you are passionate about solving it, can you make money from it or not, then build a solution.
Great marketing tool though, and taught to many budding entrepreneurs practicing their 40 second pitch as a way to get their meaning across super fast. Uber for banking means 'crowd-sourced' banking or banking provided by the masses -- was informative for me.
Assuming the figures that Conrad is saying are correct, it is still an amazing company that is growing quickly. Just investors are starting to take a more realistic view on valuations, and readjusting those valuations in their books.
Just because super ambitious growth targets aren't met doesn't mean the company is about to go under...
Ego is essential to breaking through those tough barriers and new opportunities. Disregard for risk. Is this really what is needed when Google is being criticized for falling behind its competitors in innovation.
To be fair, G+-the-product is not bad. It's G+-the-borg, the forceful attitude towards integrating other Google properties and establishing a source of truth for real names, that generated backlash and eventually doomed the project.
That might have been the internal aim of the project, but to the user G+ was just another social network. In that sense, it wasn't a terrible social network.
IMHO if Google had just kept G+ on its own (working hard on fixing the "ghost town" byproduct of evolved privacy features, and providing decent APIs), adoption numbers could have been lower in the short term, but the product would have survived in the long run. Integration with other Google products should have come naturally, not forcefully. Then we would have got a modern social network people actually wanted to join, instead of a tainted product stinking of corporate malfeasance.
You might not like G+ but it IS innovation. Everything one does in slighly different way is innovation, if you don't want that, you would have to abandon pretty much everything except wheel and fire.
I also don't think that creator's ego is a factor in product's success. There are many egotistical entrepreneurs with successful products. People might not like creators, but they like the product.
So isn't the best strategy to let the market determine if something is worth it or not? I'm sure G+ has got its valuation...
> Everything one does in slighly different way is innovation
No, it is not. If I decide to change the design of a bicycle to have square shaped wheels I have not innovated. I have instead made it objectively worse.
I think to innovate is generally accepted as meaning to improve upon something in some way. I don't think G+ improved anything, as its abject failure in the real world demonstrates.
I disagree. Was Yahoo search innovative? Google search came later and just did the search in a better way, but people still called Google search innovative!
Yahoo search did make money with banner advertisements, and when that was doing well people called Yahoo search innovative. Innovation is used like a buzz word. Truly anything new, even if it is poorer than the previous product is innovation, it may not sell, but it is innovation!
I want to down vote this comment, looks like I can't. Sometimes success of a product also depends on being in the right place at right time. It is not binary
I wonder if, in the future, people will compile these writings into a book with numbers for easy reference of quotes. They could also add testaments of things He said as recorded by His disciples.
May you be blessed, brother. Let us find wisdom and civility in His word of Ref. 1, PG 09:14, Psalm 9:2. "If you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence".
I wasn't equating ego to meanness, more a disregard of what other people think about them, not being afraid to fail also not to compromise their product to make everyone happy and ending up with a washed down product.
In the sense that "ego" is understood in both psychology and spiritual circles, low egotism is associated with the qualities you describe.
High egotism -> high conscious opinion of one's self (compensating for low subconscious self-worth), need for external affirmation of self-worth, and propensity for aggression and meanness in the pursuit of that affirmation.
Low egotism -> content with self-worth, unreactive to external criticism or praise, willingness to do what is "for the greater good" regardless of short term challenges and resistance, trusting one's self to achieve the best outcome in the end.
I think we fool ourselves into believing there is external pressure for quick, dirty, please everyone, "will fix it later" solutions when no one sane asks for that.
Modern management is trying to apply command and control to creative endeavours, and usually forces everyone to fail.
Sometimes it's possible to wander around, rejecting the views of everyone else and creating a perfect product. More often you get something no one wants.
A better approach is to have enough time and money to walk in the right direction, carefully. No matter how many times I think of the idea of a start up running ahead I think of disorganised mob, not a disciplined army.
The goal is to take a disciplined army into the unknown.
I wouldn't conflate lack of ego with lack of drive or ambition or an averseness to risk. Especially for someone who went from a lower middle class family in one of the poorest states in India to becoming the CEO of Google.
When a group of very smart people get together, there is a tendency for them to try to show themselves as being the smartest. This can lead to less-desirable situations where people don't share or cooperate as freely as they should. In the worst cases the situation could become antagonistic with individuals or entire teams and departments refusing to talk to each other. Now in a group of smart people, walks in a person like Sundar Pichai, someone without ego, who always defers to the other person, who might put himself/herself down to make the other person feel better. When two people in the group get into a conflict on an issue (remember this is a group that can get into religious wars over which brace style to use), it will be that person who mediates and gets the team going again. When the team has to vote on a new leader, that person is likely to get the most votes because he/she is the person everyone has the least issues with. Such a person who avoids conflict is able to act as transcendental force. People are more willing to listen to such a person or do what he/she says because they don't feel threatened by him/her.
Someone like Steve Jobs who always puts himself above everyone else, could also act as a transcendental force as long as people agree to that. But if someone like Steve Jobs was to start at the bottom of the organisation, and moves up the ladder to its top position, it would be by putting other people and teams down. These people might harbour a grudge or ill-will and be less likely to do what the new boss says. It is not a strategy without its downsides (For example why did someone as incredibly gifted as Steve Wozniak end up leaving Apple?).
By promoting similar people to leadership positions, Pichai is creating a environment where people with great talent but less taste for politics can also get their voice heard. I think such an environment is good for creativity to flourish.
"A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit."
"Especially for someone who went from a lower middle class family in one of the poorest states in India to becoming the CEO of Google."
Not to take anything away from Sundar Pichai's accomplishments, but Tamil Nadu, from where he hails, is decidedly not "one of the poorest states in India." It has the second largest gross state domestic product in the country. [1]
Perhaps. Although lot of articles seem to claim that he was from a lower-middle class family, and i was basing my statement on those. His upbringing probably wasn't uncomfortable but still it was modest.
How do we know 'life' can't evolve in some other way? I find it interesting how scientists are always looking for 'earth' like planets... then again it is a good place to start.
Fantastic comment. Totally agree. Biotech, pharma, you're a zero revenue company until that massively expensive FDA approval comes through. Investors are aware of this, and it is an all or nothing play.
Are you happy with a $2million revenue a year business, or do you want to be the next unicorn?
You might find a large problem to solve, but is it some thing your are passionate about? Or perhaps you love selling antique nail clippers for example, which is probably a very small market, but you love doing it and supplementing your day job income.
Find a problem, decide if you are passionate about solving it, can you make money from it or not, then build a solution.