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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

IMO no. The unique combination of parameters with early-Google were:

- Small, relatively young company.

- Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue

You can't run a company this way unless you have a very large money firehose.

The last time this happened was early-Facebook. I don't think there has been a single company since then that fit the description - which IMO is fine, the celestial alignment of factors is pretty rare.

Companies nowadays have kind of the opposite problem: lots of hiring, but not enough revenue to show for it. Some tried to build a similar culture on VC funding but imploded once the cash ran out. You really need an intensely profitable product to make this formula work.

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Google was like this before they identified the ad firehose. Facebook didn’t find its own profits until way after IPO. Thats not the correct answer. It was that they were instantly truly successful without being blatantly exploitative (which Uber et al were). And the investors trusted that they will find their profits somewhere. That environment doesn’t exist anymore. Except maybe in OpenAI.

Google AdWords launched in 2000; AdSense in 2003. Google itself only dates to 1998; there's not much "before" the ads.

They probably mean pre-doubleclick

OpenAI seems to be a bunch of people who spend 18 hours a day trying to bring about AGI, though. Driven, sure, but nobody is looking to solve world hunger there unless it involves a cluster of GPUs in some way.

I don’t remember Google solving world hunger either?

Sure, but they had people who tried. I can’t say that they were effective but you could actually work on “I’m going to work with farmers in China to see if we can boost their crop yields” as your job, at least you could in the past.

AGI might solve world hunger, although that particular problem seems to be more about societal organization and trust between people. AGI would without doubt lead to an incredible productivity boost though, and that helps solve many existential problems we currently have as well.

Right, that’s what I’m talking about. Early Google wasn’t like “oh if we pair people with better ads the markets become more efficient and this society benefits” or whatever. They literally had people working on protein folding because they were interested in it.

Indeed. I don't know that something like this can ever happen again, barring another major upset. Many people don't realize or remember how transformative the dot-com era really was. The amount of money firehose that was there to go around was staggering. We're just at a much more mature point in the market. Ironically, a lot of the people that make it difficult/impossible to have the money firehose are the ones that made their fortune from that environment!

It's still possible for a one-off startup here and there to maybe get into this boat, but at this point the big tech players are there to slurp up the real money makers early and often and assimilate them into the borg.

If this sort of environment were what I wanted to work in, I'd probably look at specialized teams/niches inside of big corps. Surely very difficult to find, but they do exist.

Roblox was like that for a while. They did some nice work on scaling up big MMOs with user-created content, something I'm into. They overexpanded, losing money on every user. They'd gone public, and the stock is way down. Peaked at $126, now $40. Despite many attempts, they just can't retain users beyond middle school.

Not to digress too far from the OP, but Roblox graphics are ass. If they could do Fortnite they would capture the more lucrative demographics.

I also think that experimental culture is gone due to things like startup culture. Any half viable idea, they leave and create a startup.

So Google has really only been doing obvious ideas. Like Pixel phones, Pixel buds, getting into cloud too late.

That's true, that's not much incentive for a brilliant individual to do something inside Google when they can do it outside and make a lot more money without any politics. In the 0% interest rate world anyway.

I read somewhere that Google had to increase all it's perks just to increase expenses so as to balance out some small revenue %. Their early growth was that insane. No company has such luxury today. The barriers to entry almost everywhere is levelled. No company will have the profit head start that Google had, at least not in tech.

> - Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue

clearly you're incorrect, since Google was (famously!) exactly like this before the ads firehose of cash started.

Some of the runaway gaming companies were like this as well. Zynga comes to mind. That changed quite quickly.

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