DON DODGE: Hi.
I'm Don Dodge, and this is Google Root Access.
Today I have a special guest, my friend and colleague Louis
Gray.
Welcome, Louis.
LOUIS GRAY: Thanks for having me back on the show, Don.
DON DODGE: Hey, it's great to have you.
So you wrote a blog post recently, something about you
don't get a medal just for showing up.
What did you mean?
LOUIS GRAY: I have a five-year-old boy
who's in Little League.
And every day he's constantly telling me
about how he's going to get a medal.
And he's just going to get two trophies,
and this'll be his second trophy because it's his second year.
And when you're five years old, you
might get a participation trophy for being in the league.
But when you're an adult and when you're participating
in the workforce, be it in Silicon Valley or anywhere
around the world, you don't get a presentation medal
just for showing up.
So my blog posts have been something
I've been thinking about, not just for months but for years,
about people's sense of entitlement,
people's sense of risk and working hard,
and how there's really this calculation of effort,
the amount of work that you put into something,
the amount of hours that you put into something,
the amount of thought and innovation
you put into something against market opportunity
and against risk.
The people who are the household names,
be they the Steve Jobs and the Bill Gates
and the Marissa Mayers and the Jack Dorseys of the world,
they are all the products of people
who saw something and took exceptional effort.
Nobody just shows up to Silicon Valley and sits back
and waits for the money to roll in.
It might look easy based on what you read, but it's not real.
DON DODGE: Right.
So you don't get a medal for being smart or working
really hard either.
So those aren't necessarily guarantees to success either.
LOUIS GRAY: No.
There's a lot of smart people in the world.
And one of the exciting things about working at Google
is I feel like I've seen a lot of them.
And I know a lot of people who work very hard.
But the catch is that even though you
might be an exceptional employee and you
might be a very smart person, you
could end up working at a company that just doesn't work
out based on timing or market fit
or issues with the product or unforeseen market conditions.
And I think that's something we hear a lot in economics.
And on the flip side, you have people
who possibly, if you were to stack
rank them, don't work as hard, but might actually make money
because they were at the right place at the right time.
There is no crystal ball that makes this a perfect scenario.
And you see often this dichotomy of very good,
strong employees who work hard at companies that don't work
out relative to people who might have been more mid-level
or possibly underperforming, but ended up at the company
at the right time when they got acquired by a bigger company
and they got to write a paycheck that someone else didn't.
And you could look back at that and say, woe is me.
I wasn't on the right side of the ledger.
But the truth is that you have to keep going.
Something that I know you and I talk about a lot
is that the ratio of startups that fail to those who succeed
is very high.
I was always taught 9 out of 10 startups fail.
And I've seen that number bandied about.
It could be 80%, 50%, 70%.
But we all know that there's a very good chance when
you take a risk, it might not end up with a pot of gold
at the end of the rainbow.
DON DODGE: So you're a big baseball fan.
And in baseball, if you're a 300 hitter, you're a big success.
And those numbers sort of translate to startups, too.
LOUIS GRAY: Well, they do.
And one thing about baseball is it's extremely hard.
You fail 70% of the time, and you
end up being one of the top 10 or top 20 in your league,
depending on the year and the distance to the mound and all
that good stuff.
But with a startup, it's not just 70%.
It might be even higher than that.
And one thing I remember reading about a lot,
when I first started working in the Valley 10, 15 years ago,
is that people would change jobs frequently.
And they were talking about people not having careers
where they stayed 10 years, 20 years,
30 years at IBM like they used to.
But they were changing jobs every 18 months to 24 months.
It was an interesting scenario, because not only was there
the availability of jobs and the ability for job hoppers,
as they were called, to move from company to company,
but people would keep trying to make it work.
And they never gave up based on the fact
that the last place didn't work out.
They just kept going.
And everyone kind of sees that there is an opportunity.
And sometimes you get this feeling of the grass
being greener on the other side.
And you see people do a lot of that flipping.
And so it's no longer like a black mark on your resume
to say that you've worked at six places in nine years.
It's almost expected.
DON DODGE: So you also said there's
this intersection of skill and luck
that happens in Silicon Valley.
And to extend the baseball analogy,
sometimes mediocre players get lucky to be
on great teams that win.
And the same happens in startups.
LOUIS GRAY: I think that's a perfect analogy.
You've seen people who end up sitting on the bench
or don't even play; they're on the disabled list.
And yet, the next year they get a World Series ring.
And you go, well, come on.
Here's a guy who maybe won 25 games.
That's an incredible year for a pitcher.
But he played for the third place team.
Luck didn't work out in the playoffs,
and they didn't get to go.
The same thing is true when it comes to business.
Even if you read all the tomes from Jack Welch
and the other guys who've been there and done it before,
it doesn't mean that you're guaranteed
to have a positive outcome.
One thing I remember specifically,
when I was at Berkeley my senior year and the year afterward,
I would go to the city public library,
and I would read all these stories about Silicon Valley.
I remember specifically reading one about Larry Ellison,
where it said if you know the difference between God
and Larry Ellison it's that God doesn't believe he's
Larry Ellison, one of the most memorable titles.
And I remember having a conversation
with a friend of mine.
And she almost mocked me and said,
why are you reading these books?
It doesn't mean that by reading these books
you're going to end up in the Valley.
And I kind of want to turn around now and go,
well, here we are.
We're actually working at Google.
It's very cool place to work, and you
have to impact on these really innovative things.
But just because you read about it or you know about it
doesn't mean that you're going to have that mastery of it.
And it doesn't mean that even if you do everything
to the best of your ability that you're
going to be the guy with the trophy at the end.
And so I wanted to put this post up.
What I've been really thinking about
is you see a kind of an assumption
from the outside world about what the Valley is
like, that there's a gold rush, or that you go to Sand Hill
Road and get funded, not once but thrice,
or that you should be able to join a company
and 18 months later go IPO.
I think both you and I have had real business experiences
at companies that-- yourself with Napster
is a fantastic example, at a company everybody knew,
and everybody knew it would be the hot thing.
And you didn't get rich from Napster.
And I was at a company for 8 and 1/2 years
where we grew from first customer ship all the way
through filing for IPO, not once but twice.
And very interesting scenarios all the way through as you
go through rounds of layoffs and venture funding.
And the type of things I think you and I have seen
could fill books.
And that's part of what I want to get that story out,
for those who haven't been here yet,
or those who have only seen the good news, that they should
know that there's a flip side to the coin, too.
DON DODGE: Well, that's a good topic for another show.
But that's all we have time for today.
So thank you for joining us.
I'd like to remind you if you're a developer
and you're building applications on the cloud,
you might try the Google Cloud Platform.
We have a special $2,000 credit for anyone
who would like to try it.
And the details are on your screen.
Thank you very much for joining us and see you next time.