Lessons from the Googleplex

This article first appeared September 22, 2009.

The classic entrepreneur’s dream is to take a business from four people operating out of a spare room into a worldwide success. A start up map application founded on Sydney’s North Shore is one of those stories.

Where 2 Technologies went from four people in a Hunters Hill bedroom through the venture capital jungle of Silicon Valley to become Google Maps. So the opportunity to interview Lars Rasmussen, one of the four founders, on my ABC radio spot last week was too good to resist.

Being laid off in the tech wreck, realising a good idea makes a great opportunity, living on the smell of an oily rag, finding the right market and finally being bought by a big company who lets you continue pursuing your passions makes a great story.

The full tale can be downloaded from the ABC Nightlife website and it’s worth a listen just to be inspired by how hard work, vision and flexibility can have great results.

“Sweat equity”, is an expression I hadn’t heard before the program and it’s a terrific term that anyone who has been involved in a start-up would understand. Founders’ sweat is almost worth more than it’s weight in gold and it something we all, including most business founders, underestimate the value of.

Another lesson is resilience – all four of Where 2 Technologies’ founders had been laid off in the tech wreck and were lucky to have jobs in service stations. But rather than let this get them down, they regrouped and worked on their ideas.

At one stage they discovered Yahoo! was releasing a mapping function and no investor would touch them while the market waited to see how good the competing product was. Yet rather than giving up, they worked on improving their product.

Improving the product cuts to the ethos of a start-up software company. Most new businesses in the sector subscribe to the “fail fast” theory where you get a new product out the door before it’s perfect to see if there is a market for it and iron out the bugs later.

That fits into the larger Google philosophy where employees are encouraged to spend time exploring their own projects and can float new ideas in Google Labs. If it turns out customers want the product and it meets the markets’ needs better than existing players, then it’s worth persisting with.

This appetite for risk is what differentiates fast growing businesses and sectors from the rest of the economy. All too often we’re being held back by businesses that prefer the easy life of milking their existing customer base and won’t risk even a tiny portion of their capital or staff’s time.

Taking risks is what differentiates great companies from the mundane, which do you want to be?

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Paul Wallbank is a writer, speaker and broadcaster on technology issues. He founded national support organisation PC Rescue in 1995 and has spent over 14 years helping businesses get the most from their IT investment. His PC Rescue and IT Queries websites provide free advice to business computer users and his monthly newsletter has over 3,000 subscribers.