Googley

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pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Patients rate doctors—like teachers and plumbers—at various online services, but they’re not terribly helpful because I don’t know anything about the people leaving comments. I’d at least like to get a list of all the conditions a doctor treats and how often so I can pick the most experienced specialist. If a Googley restaurant would tell me how many diners ordered the crab cakes, a Googley doctor should tell me how often she has treated afib. I would also be impressed if the doctor treating me had written about the condition online. I’d be doubly impressed if I saw other doctors linking to her. The changes in medicine we’ve touched on all relate to information: opening it up, sharing it, organizing it, analyzing it, bringing the network effect to the industry and our health.

Everybody needs Googlejuice Googlejuice? That’s the magic elixir you drink when Google values you more because the world values you more. It’s another virtuous circle: The more links, clicks, and mentions you get, the higher you rise in Google’s search results, offering you the potential for yet more clicks. The rich get richer, the Googley Googlier. I wonder whether, someday, companies will come to be valued not only on their revenue, marketshare, EBITDA, and profit but also on their Googlejuice. The benefits of Googlejuice are lost on companies that do not make their information searchable—from local businesses that don’t have sites to stores that don’t post sales to manufacturers that don’t publish product details to magazines that put content online in overcomplicated designs and databases that Google can’t read.

So what did I do? Of course, I asked Google how fast an eye blinks and in .3 seconds it told me that a blink takes .3 seconds. One of Google’s own principles—the “10 things Google has found to be true”—is: “Fast is better than slow.” A pillar of its design principles—from Google’s list of what makes a design Googley—is: “Every millisecond counts…. Speed is a boon to users. It is also a competitive advantage that Google doesn’t sacrifice without good reason.” Speed is a tenet of the Google religion. Google has made us an impatient people, more than we know. If we can get any of the world’s knowledge in a blink, why should we wait on hold or in line or until your office opens?


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Early on this was a tangible corporate asset. In a book on management, Laszlo Bock, Google’s longtime HR boss, wrote that the company hired for “Googley” traits: humility, conscientiousness, and “comfort with ambiguity.” Being willing to plunge down a slide at work without shame—that’s Googley. Being Googley had a motto: “Don’t politick. Use data.” During a debate before buying YouTube, one Google executive questioned if the company should be profiting from pirated material, asking over email, “Is this Googley?” But over time “being Googley” had also morphed into an epithet for someone with a slavish devotion to Google’s management culture and system of pedigree, someone who would subsume emotion and eccentricity for the greater Google cause, who could be a bit of a cipher.

He was told that such tweaks could appear as opposition to free speech, something Google wanted to avoid, and might disrupt the sanctity of search. He heard one concern repeatedly: “That’s not very Googley.” Where was his data to support that argument? Another person working at YouTube then recalled that after she protested a particular decision, co-workers accused her of not being “positive” and “Googley.” Once, Mengerink’s position was called “creepy.” His colleagues were not unaware of objectionable videos or particularly fond of them. They had begun discussing ideas for a “penalty box” treatment for troublesome creators like Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist whose talk show, InfoWars, was gaining a massive audience on YouTube.

Libraries celebrated banned books and free speech, kind of like YouTube. “We’re really more like a library,” Wojcicki said. This was a strained analogy for the chief of a division that would net $11.2 billion in sales that year by placing ads in front of its library material. But it was very Googley. Wojcicki then laid out her Googley fix for YouTube’s conspiracy problem: the company would introduce “information cues,” little boxes of text beneath videos about flat-earth and other “well-known internet conspiracies.” It would scrape this material from Wikipedia, as Google did on search, relying on this user-generated, nonprofit site that managed to hew consistently to the truth.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

As Salah learned more about the company and began furnishing the buildings that Google would later populate, he roughed out a set of design guidelines that expressed what he saw as Larry and Sergey’s values. The list centered on several “key performance principles.” The very first one: “Create a ‘Googley’ atmosphere.” Being truly Google goes beyond painting the walls with bright colors and liberally distributing lava lamps. A Googley space is one that reflects—and supports—our employees. We are a diverse team of committed, talented, smart, thoughtful hard-working individuals. Our core values should be manifested in our work environment. It didn’t take long for Google to begin growing out of Bayshore—the head count was doubling in size every few months as deals brought in new traffic, and the success of ads required a whole infrastructure of billing and business operations.

When Schillace went to Google in 2006, he had to struggle to get resources in the data center. “They had this crazy hand-cobbled system where there was one guy in the middle doing the planning—it was, like, put a bottle of vodka on his desk, and you’d get your machines for the service.” That un-Googley system was replaced by something very Googley—an auction-based allocation. Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, would later explain how it worked when new data centers open: “We’ll build a nice new data center and say, ‘Hey, Google Docs, would you move your machines over here?’ And they say, ‘Sure, next month.’ Because nobody wants to go through the disruption of shifting.

The eighteen APMs on the trip worked all over Google: in search, advertising, applications, and even stealth projects such as Google’s attempt to capture the rights to include magazines in its index. Mayer’s team, along with the APMs themselves, had designed the agenda of the trip. Every activity had an underlying purpose to increase the participants’ understanding of a technology or business issue, or make them more (in the parlance of the company) “Googley.” In Tokyo, for instance, they engaged in a scavenger hunt in the city’s legendary Akihabara electronics district. Teams of APMs were each given $50 to buy the weirdest gadgets they could find. Ducking into backstreets with stalls full of electronic parts and gizmos, they wound up with a cornucopia: USB-powered ashtrays shaped like football helmets that suck up smoke; a plate-sized disk that simulated the phases of the moon; a breathalyzer you could install in your car; and a stubby wand that, when waved back and forth, spelled out words in LED lights.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

We could easily spot the aspirants—they'd be sitting out on the deck sweating in navy blue suits while all around them Googlers in shorts and sandals chatted and chewed. Any Googler who happened to be within earshot could pepper candidates with questions, and the answers could influence a hiring decision as much as anything in the formal interview process. Giving off a "Googley" vibe mattered. I never knew whom I might bump into while waiting for a fresh platter of polenta to be put out. At first, celebrity drop-ins tended to be tech luminaries like pundit Esther Dyson, Sun superstar Kim Polese, or the chairman of Intel, but as Google's fame grew, you were just as likely to run into Nobel laureates and internationally known politicians, people like Muhammad Yunus, Queen Noor, Bill Clinton, or Jimmy Carter, pushing trays along the aluminum rails under Charlie's watchful eye as the Grateful Dead wailed from wall-mounted speakers.

Individual servers, whether of web pages or of steamed broccoli, might give out, but the system wasn't truly broken as long as it kept delivering results. To their undying credit, Charlie, Jim, and the rest of the Google kitchen crew never experienced a catastrophic failure. Day after day after day, they fed us—their infrastructure running on elbow grease, ingenuity, and heart. It was a very Googley way to be. Chapter 8 Cheap Bastards Who Can't Take a Joke HOW MANY GOOGLERS does it take to screw in a light bulb?" Sergey asked the UI team in late February 2000. His complaint was about browser buttons—a trivial bit of code that allowed users to add Google search links to their web-surfing software.

"If they liked something they'd say, 'It doesn't seem too sucky,'" recalls facilities manager George Salah. "When they pushed back on something, they'd say, 'Hmmmm, that seems suboptimal' or use some technical way of saying something between yes and no. They never gave a clear decision." When I took copy to Sergey for approval, he would say, "It's cute. I like it" or "No. That's not very Googley." Once I spent days with my team developing a full rationale for an ad campaign, based on what we understood about the target audience and their motivations. Sergey glanced at the layouts, frowned, and said, "I think you need to think about it some more." "Is it the concept you don't like? The art?


pages: 411 words: 119,022

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

We’d also bought a company called Dropcam and created the first Nest Cam and added it to the Nest app and spent countless hours trying to integrate with Google and figure out email addresses, corporate security, whose servers had what data on them, privacy policies, etc. And despite being part of Google, we made little attempt to be Googley, to truly join the culture. A small contingent of Nesters had come from Apple, where Google was Enemy #1 and they had to be talked down from a cliff. But most of us just liked our way of doing things. We didn’t want to be Googley. I wasn’t about to wear a propeller baseball hat, like new Googlers do. I can understand why we stood out like a sore thumb, why we weren’t welcomed with open arms. But even with all that, the acquisition wasn’t a complete disaster.

We were just last night’s dinner. If I had talked to regular employees on the teams we wanted to integrate with, I would have found out what their priorities were and whether they were remotely interested in working with us. I would have understood better what it meant to be Googley and whether we had a chance of breaking through—and whether we could ever change what being Googley really meant. Culture is incredibly sticky. I should have remembered that. Larry, with Bill Campbell’s prodding, wanted Nest to come in and shift Google’s entire way of thinking, to give it a burst of startup mojo. But culture doesn’t work that way—you can’t repaint an old factory and show the workers a training video and think you’ve made any kind of difference.

On day one, with just a tweet-sized number (of very public) words, we innocently, naively alienated the company we had just joined. Many Googlers saw us as a band of fighters running at them, armed to the teeth and ready for war, already declaring independence, already rejecting Google’s core business, and thought, Huh. What’s up with them? Not very Googley. The Google teams with whom we’d planned to integrate and codevelop technologies and products were reluctant to work with us. They kept asking their execs for more details to figure out if they really had to help us at the expense of their own projects. Why? Why? Why do we have to help a team that isn’t Google?


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Google demanded that its things work faster and better than anyone else’s, and without the compromises so many other products put up with. Combined, these two qualities came close to defining “Googley,” an adjective used on campus for things that reflected the firm’s idea of the good.15 However they could express this ideal they did. Why not have a campus where the food is both delicious and free, so you didn’t waste time in line at the cash register? Why not give away gigabits of free storage to users? Scan the world’s books? Drive trucks mounted with cameras through the streets everywhere and create a pictorial map? But nothing should be Googley-er than the flagship itself: and so Google search had to be not merely better than the rest but a thousand times better than those ugly and slow stepsisters, like Yahoo!

Flynn, “With Goto.com’s Search Engine, the Highest Bidder Shall Be Ranked First,” New York Times, March 16, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/​1998/​03/​16/​business/​with-gotocom-s-search-engine-the-highest-bidder-shall-be-ranked-first.html; “Rankings for Sale: Payola on the Information Highway? Or Payments for Good Shelf Space?,” From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal 10 (2001), http://www.fno.org/​apr01/​payola.html. 14. Brin and Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” 15. For a description of the term “Googley,” see Sara Kehaulani Goo, “Building a ‘Googley’ Workforce,” Washington Post, October 21, 2006. 16. A more detailed description of Google’s AdWords can be found at “How AdWords Works,” Google Support, February 21, 2016, https://support.google.com/​adwords/​answer/​2497976?hl=en. For additional information about AdWords success, see Peter Coy, “The Secret to Google’s Success,” Bloomberg Business, March 5, 2006; Steven Levy, “Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability,” Wired, May 22, 2009. 17.


The Complete Android Guide: 3Ones by Kevin Purdy

car-free, card file, crowdsourcing, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, John Gruber, lock screen, QR code, Skype, speech recognition, telemarketer, turn-by-turn navigation

If you've traded a few emails back and forth, and Google's mathematical formula deems you to be fairly copacetic, that other person gets copied into "My Contacts." In theory, this should save you headaches. In practice, it is its own unique kind of migraine. Almost as if to confess to its confusion, Google's Contacts on Android lets you choose which Google Contacts groups to sync, so that you can have your whole Google-y world linked up by checking each group, along with "All Other Contacts," or just sync up "My Contacts," or whatever other group you've chosen. We'll make our own syncing group in just a bit—for now, let's finish up with what we have in the "Display Options." Syncing Twitter, Facebook, e-mail etc. with contacts Just below your main Google account listing you'll see the syncing options for any other email accounts you've set up on your phone, along with social networks like Facebook or Twitter, and any other application where you'd build your own contact list.

You can choose "Text Messaging" from the main menu to read and send messages, but at any point, you can also hit the "+" button in the upper-right corner to create a new message, and choose text message to start composing an SMS. * * * The built-in Messaging app doesn't seem all that new, different, or Google-y from a glance—and Google Voice is, in some ways, the better way to go with an Android phone—but it's all the other features of your phone that make Messaging more convenient than with a "chiclet" phone: voice input, alternative swipe-style keyboards, copy/paste between SMS and other apps, and good apps for sending and viewing pictures, audio, and video.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

He explains: “Our ads should always be aesthetically pleasing so people will think happy thoughts when they think of Google.” Page is rarely so callous, but like his friend he seems blind to shades of gray, particularly when looking at his own company. Even his vocabulary is black and white. What’s good is “Googley.” What’s bad is “Not Googley.” Any outsider who dares to question Google’s motives or criticize its actions is a “bastard.” The word “evil” is tossed around carelessly. Such a blinkered and self-serving view of the world may be forgivable in a young entrepreneur trying to get an ambitious technology company off the ground, but as Google has grown and its influence expanded, its hubris has become a problem.

The way he responds to the antitrust investigations, to the company’s aggressive new rivals, and to persistent public concerns about online privacy and security will determine whether Google flourishes or flounders in the years ahead. His success will likely hinge on his ability to get beyond a black-and-white, us-versus-them view of the challenges facing his company, to realize that even bastards may have a point. He’ll have to become a little less Googley and a little more worldly. That won’t be easy. Edwards begins his book with an anecdote about a meeting he had with Page back in 2002. Bruised by the founder’s tendency to dismiss or ignore his suggestions, the marketer arrives at Page’s office looking to ingratiate himself with his prickly boss.


pages: 275 words: 84,418

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

But after the euphoria of the acquisition wore off, it became clear that even at Google getting Android off the ground was going to be one of the hardest things Rubin had undertaken in his life. Just navigating Google itself was initially a challenge for Rubin and his team. There was no hard-and-fast org chart, as in other companies. Every employee seemed right out of college. And the Google culture, with its famous “Don’t be evil” and “That’s not Googley” sanctimony, seemed weird for someone such as Rubin, who had already been in the workplace twenty years. He couldn’t even drive his car to work because it was too fancy for the Google parking lot. Google was by then filled with millionaires who had gotten rich on the 2004 IPO. But in an effort to preserve Google’s brand as a revolutionary company with a revolutionary product—the anti-Microsoft—all cars fancier than a 3 Series BMW were banned.

Before Google went public—and became subject to SEC rules—Schmidt, Brin, and Page even shared details about Google’s revenues and profits in companywide meetings in front of more than a thousand employees. Rubin respected Google’s unique approach. But he also understood that if other companies knew what he was working on, they might beat him to the marketplace. “There were plenty of pissed-off Googlers who said we’re not Googley because we’re not sharing,” a former top Android engineer told me. “We had to turn down some very senior people who wanted to see our source code, and Andy had to be the bad guy. So there was a lot of tension.” Rubin wasn’t just driven by his need to make sure Android moved fast. He knew that producing software for smartphones was vastly different from producing software for the web, which was Google’s primary business.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

HubSpot also potentially represents more upside, financially. The big company in Silicon Valley is already big. The people who got rich there were the ones who joined fifteen years ago. HubSpot is just starting out. If HubSpot goes public, and if its stock really takes off—if HubSpot becomes the next Microsoft, or Google—I might make some serious money, something I’ve managed to avoid doing over the course of my career as a journalist. “Basically I’m making a bet,” I say to Sasha, after we’ve put the kids to bed and we’re talking about which job I should take. “The only way the HubSpot job is worth taking is if they’re going to go public and have a big IPO.”

In the early days at Facebook, the young employees had a master password to gain access to anyone’s account, according to a book by a former Facebook employee. Dirty tricks have become par for the course at these places. In 2011 Facebook was caught running a sneaky smear campaign, hiring a PR firm to spread negative stories about Google—I know because I’m the reporter who caught them and broke the story for Newsweek. Facebook’s entire business model is based on mining personal data in order to deliver targeted advertising. The same goes for Google and countless other online companies. We have no idea who has access to what. We also have no choice but to go along.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

Encouraged to “act like owners” of the company and speak up when issues arose, it was “Googley” to voice concerns, relay worries to leadership, and to be an active member whose skills and opinions shaped the company. As rumors spread about this new project, uneasy Google employees put out feelers to investigate. They dug through lines and lines of computer code to learn more about this controversial project that would potentially use Google’s AI tools as weaponry. Liz Fong-Jones, then an engineer at Google, caught wind of the company’s secret Project Maven—and, in Googley fashion, posted her concerns on a blog post that garnered support from others in the company.


pages: 387 words: 119,409

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

They have modest budgets (typically $1,000 or $2,000 per year) and their brief is to nudge the local office cultures along, staying connected to the rest of Google and encouraging both play and honest discussion. There is no application to be named the leader of a Culture Club. You become one simply by acting like one: taking charge of local office events, being vocal, and—importantly—emerging as a leader to whom others look for advice on what is “Googley.” Eventually, Stacy finds you and asks you to take on the role.63 I mentioned earlier that there are various ways to build great businesses, and companies have been successful with both low-freedom and high-freedom models. Google is clearly in the latter camp. Once you’ve chosen to think and act like a founder, your next decision is about what kind of culture you want to create.

In the first half of 2012, we had a 30 percent no-show rate, which prevented Googlers on the waitlist from taking courses and caused us to run half-empty classes. We tried four different email nudges, ranging from appealing to our desire to avoid harming others (showing photos of people on the waitlist so enrollees could see who would be harmed by a no-show) to relying on identity consistency (reminding enrollees to be “Googley” and do the right thing). The nudges had the dual effect of reducing no-shows and increasing the rate at which people canceled their slots in advance, which allowed us to offer them to other Googlers. The effects of each nudge were different, however. Showing the photos of waitlisted enrollees increased attendance by 10 percent but did less to encourage unenrollment.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

building a self-driving vehicle: The complexity of building self-driving cars was discussed by Google[x]’s “Captain of Moonshots” in his closing keynote address at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) 2015: Astro Teller, “How to Make Moonshots,” Backchannel, March 17, 2015, https://medium.com/backchannel/how-to-make-moonshots-65845011a277. the exceptions that nonetheless have to be dealt with: One solution is to use humans to manually troubleshoot, or at least hard-code, the exceptions. For example, here’s how Google does this for Maps: “This is a Google-y approach to the problem of ultra-reliability. Many of Google’s famously computation driven projects—like the creation of Google Maps—employed literally thousands of people to supervise and correct the automatic systems. It is one of Google’s open secrets that they deploy human intelligence as a catalyst.


pages: 525 words: 142,027

CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon

8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar

I thought of myself as someone who was the gearhead in the back, who was the person trying to bring engineering and computer science and so on into industry and that I thought I’d always probably be, as I was at Morgan Stanley in my last role, a direct report to the CIO but with more of a technical focus to my job. But it was the way that the CIO role was constructed at Google—I thought, well, that’s a CIO job I might actually like, I might actually be qualified for. My observation was, and maybe it’s a bit cynical, was that most CIOs carry a heavy burden because they’re typically one of, if not the largest cost centers in their organization. Because so much of their jobs is operations, operationally oriented and execution-oriented.

Yourdon: The reason I ask that question is that the traditional picture of the CIO is that it’s the end of the line, and a lot of the people I’ve interviewed are in their fifties or sixties. In fact, I interviewed one CIO who had just resigned—in fact, I take it back, there were three. One man was in his eighties—it’s understandable that he said, “I don’t want to be a CIO anymore.” But, particularly in the technology companies, you, the CIO of Google—I guess he’s in his thirties, but a lot are young people who have risen relatively quickly and they’re in an industry that’s moving quickly, and so they’ve got still 20 or 30 years ahead of them. And as several CIOs have told me, they never planned for this job, and they’re not going to plan for the next job.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

In a June 2010 interview, Brin told Wired magazine’s Thomas Goetz, “Generally the pace of medical research is glacial compared to what I’m used to in the Internet. We could be looking lots of places and collecting lots of information. And if we see a pattern, that could lead somewhere.”72 Goetz therefore correctly observed, “Brin is proposing to bypass centuries of scientific epistemology in favor of a more Googley kind of science. He wants to collect data first, then hypothesize, and then find the patterns that lead to answers.”73 Clearly, engineers are getting their hands wet in the biology area, and this has even forced some mavens to rethink how they talk about the subject. Mike Kope, the CEO of Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Foundation, says that the organization’s message is now quite simple: “repair the damage, don’t chase the pathology.” 74 And although science has made excellent progress when it comes to understanding body parts like the kidney and heart, the brain remains too complicated to fully comprehend.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Google workers were likely well aware of this state of affairs, but there is intense pressure inside the firm to present a sunny public face, as one email written by a Google exec demonstrates: “If you’re considering sharing confidential information to a reporter—or to anyone externally—for the love of all that’s Googley, please reconsider! Not only could it cost you your job, but it also betrays the values that make us a community.”29 Google workers are muffled by strict confidentiality agreements that likely violate federal and state employment law. In May 2016 the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against the company for “unlawful surveillance and interrogation in order to chill and restrict employee rights.”


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Earlier self-actualizing Valley generations had Esalen; the post-2000 crowd had Burning Man. The annual festival of art and drugs and free expression in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert—a self-described “catalyst for creative culture in the world” that the co-founders attended faithfully each year—became metaphor and motif for all things Googley. An homage to the Man adorned the foyer of one of the buildings on Google’s campus. The company sponsored shuttle buses to take Googlers to Black Rock each year. In 2001, a key factor in Brin and Page agreeing to bring in Valley veteran Eric Schmidt as CEO was the fact that Schmidt was already a Burner.10 Schmidt’s hire was a long-fought victory for John Doerr and Michael Moritz, who had insisted the two founders bring on an experienced chief executive as a condition of their first investment and watched in frustration as Page and Brin rejected close to fifty candidates before they settled on Schmidt.

Advertisers only paid when the searcher clicked on their link.12 The eagle-eyed Googlers saw what Overture was doing and knew that this was where the future lay. But they didn’t like the other company’s practice of selling search results out to the highest bidder, making it difficult for the user to distinguish a truly relevant site from one that paid for its spot on the list. That definitely wasn’t Googley. Instead, they produced a system (similar enough that Overture sued for patent infringement) that adopted the keyword-auction concept to generate paid results, subtly but clearly marked “ad,” that appeared atop or to the side of a regular search. The site would stay as clean as ever, with its core principles intact.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

What’s more, it’s a good bet that artificial intelligence will rise to dominance far faster than was the case with electricity. The reason is that much of the infrastructure required to deploy AI—including computers, the internet, mobile data services and especially the massive cloud computing facilities maintained by companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google—is already in place. Imagine how rapidly electrification might have occurred if most power plants and transmission lines had already been built at the time Edison invented the light bulb. Artificial intelligence is poised to reshape our world—and it may happen much sooner than we expect it. AN “ELECTRICITY OF INTELLIGENCE” The analogy to electricity is apt in that it conveys the sense that artificial intelligence will be ubiquitous and universally accessible and that it will ultimately touch and transform nearly every aspect of our civilization.


pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

Eventually there would be about 2,500 in those four large buildings. “We want to pack those buildings, not just because it minimizes our footprint but because of the interactions you get, just accidental stuff you overhear,” says Salah. “Walking around, you feel good about being here. And that’s what’s Googley. An SGI employee from the 1990s would not recognize those offices today. The GooglePlex, as they call it, is designed like a mixed-use urban space. Googlers eat for free from a selection of cafeterias, managed by top chefs, which offer more options than most city streets. A snack or drink is always just around the corner, and comfy chairs, tables, and common meeting spaces abound.


pages: 285 words: 91,144

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman

airport security, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, data science, Day of the Dead, fake news, Frank Gehry, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Googley, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Khan Academy, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, microaggression, move fast and break things, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, the High Line, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Why was I so hard on them all the time for just wanting to be happy? “Hey, Michael!” said my mom. “Yeah, Mom?” “Stop thinking!” She splashed me and I splashed her back. I realized that this was all I’d really wanted the whole weekend. I just wanted to laugh. Chapter 26 The Noogler “Go ahead,” said our leader encouragingly, “get Googley!” Along with a couple dozen other new employees gathered in the brightly painted room, I sat at a low kindergartner-style table, knees up to my ears, cutting out construction-paper shapes with miniature scissors. It was our first day of orientation, and we all wore “Hello, My Name Is” name tags. I was having a blast making cut-out stars and comets, but the others at my table—all appearing to be about twice my age and dressed in corporate-friendly blazers, skirts, and button-downs—did not seem to share my enthusiasm.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

When Google’s facilities manager came in the next morning, he was surprised to discover that the engineer and his colleagues had knocked it down. But he didn’t complain. Neither did he complain when the engineer later changed his mind and decided he’d like to put the wall back again; instead, he mused that the process had “made it a more Googley environment.” Any veteran of MIT’s Building 20 would recognize the thought process. And when the suit-and-tie executive Eric Schmidt joined Google as the new boss in 2001, he reassured Salah, “Don’t change a thing. Make sure it looks like a dorm room.”26 “No matter what happened,” writes Steven Levy, “engineers would have the run of the place.”27 • • • The offices at Chiat/Day may have looked superficially different from the offices at Kyocera, but they were managed with fundamentally the same tidy-minded aesthetic: This place should look the way the boss wants it to look.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Before Google bought YouTube, its competing Google Video service took some basic steps to screen out copyrighted content, and some executives there believed it didn’t draw as many viewers because YouTube’s tolerance for copyright infringement gave it an edge, according to an internal presentation Viacom quoted in its court documents.56 In June 2006 one Google executive suggested that Google Video could “threaten a change in copyright policy” and “use threat to get deal sign-up,” but another wondered if this tactic was “Googley”—representative of the company’s values.57 It’s hard to know what some of the other executives thought: Hurley lost his e-mail from that time (this happened before Google purchased YouTube), Eric Schmidt testified that he deletes his unless specifically asked to do otherwise, and Google’s cofounder Larry Page, who became the company’s chief executive in April 2011, said in a deposition that he couldn’t remember whether or not he favored buying YouTube—a $1.6 billion acquisition that was the largest in the company’s history.58 “I don’t remember being upset about it,” he said, “so my guess is I was more positive than negative.”59 In March 2010, documents unsealed by the court revealed that Viacom employees had posted clips of the company’s shows on YouTube, and that the conglomerate had explored buying the video site in the summer of 2006.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

That would not be the case with a neural network. Singhal’s message was unequivocal. “I don’t want to talk to you,” he said. Ng also met with the heads of Google’s image search and video search services, and they turned him down, too. He didn’t really find a collaborator until he and Jeff Dean walked into the same microkitchen, the very Googley term for the communal spaces spread across its campus where its employees could find snacks, drinks, utensils, microwave ovens, and maybe even a little conversation. Dean was a Google legend. The son of a tropical disease researcher and a medical anthropologist, Jeff Dean grew up across the globe.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Benkler, ‘Degrees of Freedom’, 21. 15. Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics:The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2016), centrefold (table 1). 16. Robert Epstein, ‘The New Censorship’, US News, 22 July 2016 <http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/googleis-the-worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated> (accessed 1 December 2017). 17. See e.g. Allison Linn,‘Microsoft Creates AI that Can Read a Document and Answer Questions About it As Well As a Person’, The AI Blog, OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Notes 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 399 15 January 2018 <https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/microsoft-createsai-can-read-document-answer-questions-well-person/> (accessed 21 January 2018).


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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

It’s a lot of machines and a lot of systems to make that all work without requiring an army of people to maintain the system and keep it running. There’s a very complicated system problem there. We were also doing a lot of things that were new to Google. And I guess this is one difference between a regular startup and starting within Google—I think it’s a little bit different now, but at that time there was still this vision that, “We only do web search.” Now we do lots of neat products that go beyond that, but at the time, a lot of people inside the company were sort of unsure. The idea of doing this product that was receiving all the email—and we had to store the email, which is a different systems problem, really, from web search, because 164 Founders at Work in web search you go out and you crawl the web and index that data and the latencies are different.