A Quote by Lars Rasmussen
The problem we encountered with Wave at Google was that we became very isolated from the rest of the company. And in the time that it took us to build Wave, the rest of the company changed direction. I think that has a lot to do with why the product failed.
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When I did Google Wave, everyone had to be in Sydney, and a lot people actually traveled there to be part of it. There was a lot of isolation. There were a lot of things we kept secret from the company while working on Wave - just like you would at a startup.
I think the next massive wave of value creation will be when you can get a manufacturing company or agriculture devices company or a health care company to develop dozens of AI solutions to help their businesses.
A company can set off in one direction, figures out that it's not the right way to go, and then go in an entirely new direction. Over time, the product or service improves, and the company gets better at executing and delivering.
Nearly everyone is aware of dramatic changes in the world. Yet we continue to live in the assumption that we can ride out the changes without changing ourselves, coasting, as we have always coasted, on the historic wave of human development. What it will take to wake us up is a wave of equal size traveling in the opposite direction. That wave is already on its way.
If we don't build a company as influential as Google or Facebook, then we failed. I'm, like, perpetually stressed, honestly.
Designing a product and understanding how it filters through into the market and into the rest of the company is very important to me.
What's been unique about our acquisition is that Google is leaving us independent. That actually means that the company is structured the same... We really are a company within a company.
I never dreamed I could build a $100 million company. I just happened to build a $1 million company that became a $5 million company, and so on.
I realized that women are still not seen as equal to men. We had a big wave of feminism just before my generation was born. We're still sitting on this wave. There are very militant people and very aggressive women at the top of that wave but I think we have a new version of it now.
I think I've always been able to see what's coming, and when I was joining Google, people always said, 'Why are you joining this company?' It was so small at the time. I could see the importance of Google. I could see the way it was going to grow; it was going to become a big company.
The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.
You don't have to work for Google, or any of the other firms encouraging staff to pursue personal projects on company time, to use slowness to unlock your creativity. Anyone can do it. Start by clearing space in your schedule for rest, daydreaming and serendipity. Take breaks away from your desk, especially when you get stuck on a problem.
When you're running a company, you have employees - lots of them - that can interrupt your schedule. You have customers that can interrupt your schedule. You have a certain obligation to wave the flag because people expect to get out and wave the flag. The number of ways that others can command your time is high.
Wave the flag, wave the Bible, wave your sex or your business degree, whatever you want, just don't wave that thing at me.
At Travelers, we were much more opportunistic. It was very successful, but it wasn't an integrated financial services company. We had a property casualty company, a life company, a brokerage company. We were a financial conglomerate. It wasn't a unified, coordinated strategy of any sort. When it merged with Citi, that became a big issue; Citi, at that time, wasn't yet a fully integrated, coordinated company.
Someone needs to remind American CEOs that if you can't run a company that is innovative, financially sound and doesn't poison the rest of us, You can't run a company.
