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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see him break Google up in to individual product "companies", each with their own office, corporate hierarchy, balance sheet, and near complete autonomy.

Larry would act as the investor, and anyone inside the company could come ask for money to found a new "company" or for additional funding. Every company would start out with some kind of "shares" to be distributed by the founders (with vesting, etc). If a company fails the people would actually lose their jobs. If they succeed the equity would be worth some proportionally huge amount.

I don't think any company has ever tried to truly simulate startups on a scale like this while maintaining the upside and downside of a real startup.

It's just crazy enough to work and he's just crazy enough to try it.

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That's likely to shut down many, many Google services, though. So many aspects of the company are funded by search advertising. Maintaining an "investor" relationship in them would be a huge distraction.

I hope they continue down the "change the world" path by continuing to look at how their expertise in data analysis and AI can do more (like self-driving cars).

I'm really excited to see what he does.

Cypress Semiconductor is a lot like that, with individual teams in competition with one another for funding and resources.

You seem to be making it more extreme with people losing their jobs on failure. One of the advantages of having a big company is that you get to attract good people that are more risk adverse and to assign good people to projects more easily. If you let go of that I'm not sure what's the difference between what you described and a VC fund.

When a project has 200 engineers and 50 in "overhead" (designers, marketing etc.) behind it though, and you break it off - how is that a startup? It's still a 250-person company. I don't see how just cutting it off restores agility that a tiny team with a nascent project has. A large project has more stuff to break with more people that need more links to communicate, increasing the inertia of the whole thing and slowing it down.

What might be possible is some type of Skunk Works with independent leadership, which generates new ideas but leaves the fleshing out to the rest of the company. It wouldn't be associated with longterm management of one project though, more as an incubator and consultancy that spins off and checks in on projects they initiated.

>200 engineers and 50 in 'overhead' (designers, marketing etc.)

Is this a deliberate attempt to troll or are designers nothing but overhead? Poor design, particularly poor interface design, is considered a major factor in many of Google's product failures (Wave, Google TV, Buzz, et al). User interface design and consistency are frequently cited as the largest remaining gap between the Android and iOS experiences.

I'd have to heartily agree with this sentiment. While oftentimes I think we do see engineers get marginalized in favor of "business" employees or designers to disastrous effect, it's important to recognize the importance of UI/UX, especially on consumer-facing products. While Apple and its extreme focus on UX is the most prominent example, many web startups have seen success due to a combination of good marketing and design (Tumblr, Facebook (vs. Myspace), Instagram, and Flipboard come immediately to mind).

I assume the quotes implied sarcasm.

And in fairness, Wave and Android are hardly perfect examples of engineering. Wave was buggy and never added significant features, Android is still sluggish compared to iOS on similar hardware.

Google tends to lack clear direction/leadership/vision at a product level, not just UI design.

Anyway, it will never be like a startup again until moves are made from necessity, not whim.

To be fair, a lot of Wave's problems could've been nipped long before it got to the designers. The app was just plain slow. Speed is a quality all of its own.

Where's the marketing love?

Encouraging internal competition within a company has led to many disasters - Microsoft tablet vs office http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?src=t... and recently at Nokia http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/post/3565611897/what-happen...

Also, as other comments have pointed out, a lot of Google products just won't survive unless they are backed by the revenue coming from Google Search.

That's sorta what Slingshot Labs was with News Corp. They were a separate company but were funded by News Corp with the goal of innovating and generating new "startups". Employee's had equity in the company.

Kind of like a huge ycombinator.

I don't think its going to happen and I don't even think he means itwhen he says that he wants to take Google to be a startup again. I think it's a publicity stunt to attract talent. Just like their "Do no evil" tagline.

I think he means it. I have questions about whether he can actually accomplish it, but we'll see how they turn out...

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