DON DODGE: Hi.
I'm Don Dodge, and this is Google Root Access.
Today, my guest is Louis Gray, my friend
and colleague from Google.
We had a great show last week, and I invited him back again
this week to go deeper on luck and timing
and what it takes to succeed as a startup.
Welcome, Louis.
LOUIS GRAY: Thanks for having me on again, Don.
Appreciate it.
DON DODGE: Yeah.
So we got into it a little bit last week about luck and timing
and how that plays into success.
We've both been in startups where we worked hard,
we had a great idea, we did the best we could,
and for various reasons, it didn't work.
How big of a part do you think luck and timing
played in some of those and some of the ones I've done?
LOUIS GRAY: I think luck and timing are significant factors.
One thing about any kind of business
is you're not in a vacuum.
If you're starting a business in a place
has absolutely no competition, you have to stop
and think, say, maybe I'm not in a market at all.
Maybe I'm deluding myself.
Usually, you enter a market that has significant competitors,
probably two, three, five strong ones.
You have to find out what it is that differentiates you.
What is the market that you can go after first where
you have the highest chance of success,
and what do you need to do to adapt your story as you try
and broaden that market?
When you look at timing, there's also a lot of other factors
which you have absolutely no control over at all.
One company I was with, I joined the company in '01.
We launched our first product in July of 2001,
and the morning of September 11, I
was supposed to host a webinar with hundreds and hundreds
of attendees talking about our latest and greatest.
As you can imagine, that webinar didn't
happen because of other factors, and the resulting
economic crises that happened afterwards and people's lack
of willingness to take more of a risk
and go to things that are more entrenched and more secure
really impacted us as a company and impacted our ability
to be successful.
And you don't have control over that.
What you do have control over is what you have to offer,
what you bring to the table, how much attention you
pay to the rest of the market.
What are the adjustments that you need to make?
How are your customers responding
to what it is that you offer?
And what are your competitors doing well
that you could possibly learn from and do better?
DON DODGE: So timing does matter.
In the case of that example you use, September 11,
that was a big catastrophe, and no one
could have predicted that.
But there are other things that you can predict.
So give me another example of where timing mattered.
Let's talk about Twitter and Ev Williams.
So we always say teams make the difference,
but there are many examples where
a really smart team, experienced, tried something,
failed, pivoted, failed, and then did something that--
LOUIS GRAY: I think you and I both know
some of the players on that team,
but we're not intimately familiar with everything
about that team.
We start to learn more as we read those stories
and talk to people about it.
If you look at the origins of Twitter,
it came out of Odeo, which originally was a podcasting
company making podcasting software.
And when Apple integrated podcasting directly
into iTunes, their market essentially vanished overnight.
And they came up with a number of different ideas
to try and keep that company going, one of which
was this status update called Twitter
that Jack Dorsey and others had come up with.
And we all know what's happened in the ensuing years.
It really took off beyond anybody's imagination
as far as we could see.
And it's really interesting to see
how they came to that conclusion out of a company that
was in dire straits.
And I think sometimes when I talk about timing,
sometimes companies and products are ahead of the market
where the market doesn't exist yet,
but they had a brilliant idea.
Now, one of the examples I give often is from Sun Microsystems,
and Sun now is a little bit of a dinosaur.
It's gone back in time 10 years ago, 20 years ago,
they were huge.
And now in the valley, they're almost
like an afterthought in a Wikipedia entry.
But they had a product called Sun Ray,
and Sun Ray basically was a web-based operating system
where you could plug in and get all your content directly
from the main server, but have nothing on your local drive.
And when they originally came out, it just didn't work,
and there were issues with broadband capability, people
not wanting to give up the content they
have on a local operating system.
But now you see something like Chrome OS,
which I use every single day, where it just makes sense.
I can't fathom running applications locally
and having files locally anymore because the cloud has grown up,
and web internet, the speeds of the internet
have grown up so much as well.
DON DODGE: That is an excellent example.
I remember working on a network computer.
Larry Ellison and Oracle came up with this idea of a network
computer, and this was back in '97, '98,
which is exactly what the Chromebook is today.
So same idea, but the timing was wrong with the NC,
and it's right with Chrome.
LOUIS GRAY: You're talking about 1998,
and that was when the iMac came out.
And I remember hearing rumors that if you held down
the N key, it would boot up and say, "Welcome to the Mac NC."
And the original idea was that it
was supposed to have been a network-based computer,
and then at the last minute, they
threw in a four gig hard drive, and it all
went off to where it is today.
But timing is a huge deal.
I look at some of the work that we did at BlueArc.
The first years I was there, we were
selling devices that were exceptionally fast,
things that were perfect for post-production and geophysics
and bioinformatics.
But it wasn't honed enough that you could put it in a core data
IT center, and so I would see people
who weren't willing to take that risk.
But if we had been maybe either more developed and more fully
on board by the time we launched,
or if we had probably launched two years earlier,
we could have been something dramatic.
Our timing was just off based on what
we delivered versus what the market wanted at the time.
DON DODGE: So another example of timing that I use often
is Angry Birds.
Angry Birds was the 52nd game that this team built.
So same team, same general concepts, but the 52nd try
was a blockbuster billion dollar hit.
LOUIS GRAY: Which everybody knows
and everybody's played a million times.
That's a really cool thing.
I've met Mr. Angry Bird himself.
I remember seeing him at Google I/O in 2011,
always wearing the great outfit, and I
know our colleague Martin Omander has met him
several times.
But it's a really interesting story
to see you go from we're trying, we're trying, we're trying,
and we're not giving up, into something
that looks like an overnight success
because nobody was watching their first 51 tries.
I know just before the show, you and I
were talking about some well known names
in the Valley like Marissa Mayer.
Marissa is now CEO at Yahoo and had an incredible career
here at Google.
And you look at her story.
How did she join Google and become
the first female engineer?
They were talking about her having upwards of 15
or 30 different job opportunities ahead of her,
and she could have selected something else with less risk.
She could have gone ahead and picked a consulting company
and probably done exceptionally well, knowing her work ethic,
but she wouldn't have had the transformative career that she
had at Google and now at Yahoo as well.
You look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
They both had interesting careers at HP and Atari
developing Breakout, and they could have just stayed there
and been comfortable.
But instead, they wanted to change the world,
and went off and started Apple.
And just a really interesting scenario of taking a risk,
and also finding the right time to do it.
DON DODGE: So in summary, then, be really smart,
work really hard, and make the timing right.
That's the--
LOUIS GRAY: Make the timing right, and the way
you make the timing right is paying attention to the way
the customers are responding to you, the way the partners
and the other stakeholders are responding to you,
seeing what's happening in the market.
It was not the right time to launch the network computer
in 1997.
I believe the right time is now, or two years ago when I first
got my first CR48.
The ability to do what you can do today
in an always connected world is much different
than it was 15 years ago.
DON DODGE: Louis, this is awesome.
Great show.
And I think maybe we can come back again and talk
about why now, because when investors look at startups,
they hear the pitch and they look at the team
and they see everything, but to get to the timing question,
they say, why now?
And as a startup entrepreneur, if you
can't answer that question, why now, then
maybe you ought to wait.
LOUIS GRAY: Absolutely.
I think before we go, one last thing I want to talk about.
When you hit Twitter, would they ever
have succeeded without the massive penetration
of mobile and smartphones?
I think if they had just been a website, just
another flat website, they would never seen
the stratospheric growth that they've had.
And it all started with mobile and the ability
to consume the content right there on your phone
and update immediately on your phone.
And mobile has changed everything.
DON DODGE: I think you're right.
Well, thank you very much for joining us,
and join us next time when we get
into another topic of great interest.
Before we leave, I'd like to remind you of a special offer
that we have for Root Access viewers, the $2,000 Google
Cloud credit.
So if you're developing applications on the cloud,
try Google Cloud and get a $2,000 credit.
Thank you very much for joining us and see you next time.