BRIAN WEBB BLOG

Co-founding duo of Google; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, cruised onto the stage of an academically elite high school auditorium in Israel to speak to the student body. They were met with the kind of roars and excitement that teenagers usually reserve for rock stars. Larry and Sergey entered the auditorium through a rear door… leaving behind photographers, sunglasses, a pair of hired cars with drivers, and an attractive young woman that was travelling with Sergey.

Dressed casually and pleased at their welcome, they sat down and cracked smiles. They were to speak about what they had done, how they had done it, and what their dreams were for the future. “Do you guys know the story of Google… Do you want me to tell it?” Larry asked. “Yes,” the crowd shouted.

It all began while Sergey and I were Ph.D students, studying Computer Science at Stanford University. We didn’t know exactly what we wanted to do.

I got this crazy idea that I was going to download the entire web onto my computer. I told my advisor that it would only take about a week. After about a year or so… I had some, small portion of it. The students laughed.

So optimism is important, he went on. You have to be a little silly about the goals you’re going to set. You need to have a healthy disregard for the impossible, said Page. That’s a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not!

HighScalability.com offers some secrets to Amazon’s amazing success based on interviews and writings of early employees. You might not be running an online ecommerce business, but many of these principles apply to virtually any business. Listed below are just 13 of their responses. I hope you find this post interesting and beneficial to your business.

1. Teams are small. They are assigned authority and empowered to solve a problem as a service in anyway they see fit.

2. They work from the customer backward. Focus on value you want to deliver to the customer.

3. Force developers to focus on value delivered to the customer instead of building technology first… and then figuring how to use it.

4. Start with a press release of what features the user will see and work backwards to check that you are building something valuable.

5. There’s bound to be problems with anything that produces hype before real implementation.

6. Getting rid of the influence of the HiPPO’s, the “Highest Paid People in the Office.” This is done with techniques like A/B testing and Web Analytics. If you have a question about what you should do… code it up, let people use it, and see which alternative gives you the results you want.

7. Create a frugal culture. Amazon used doors for desks.

8. People’s side projects, the one’s they follow because they are interested, are often ones where you get the most value and innovation. Never underestimate the power of wandering where you are most interested.

9. Have a way to rollback if an update doesn’t work. Write the tools if necessary.

10. Look for three things in interviews: enthusiasm, creativity, competence. The single biggest predictor of success at Amazon.com was enthusiasm.

11. Innovation can only come from the bottom. Those closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it. any organization that depends on innovation must embrace chaos. Loyalty and obedience are not your tools.

12. Everyone must be able to experiment, learn, and iterate. Position, obedience, and tradition should hold no power. For innovation to flourish, measurement must rule.

13. Embrace innovation. In front of the whole company, Jeff Bezos would give an old Nike shoe as a “Just do it” award to those who innovated.

Please feel free to share your comments. I’m always thrilled to know if I’ve helped you, your business or organization in any way. - Brian

This post is not for the savvy bloggers and internet gurus of our audience. While RSS has been available since 1999, a significant number of web users still don’t know what it is. This post is to the portion of our audience that isn’t quite comfortable yet with RSS.

In short, RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” RSS is simply a format used to publish frequently updated content; such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for you to keep up with your favorite websites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

For example… towards the top of the right-hand column of this blog, you’ll notice two buttons with the orange RSS logo. One is titled “Subscribe to Entries RSS” and the other is titled “Subscribe to Comments RSS.” To subscibe to the entries of this blog using RSS, you would click the button titled “Subscribe to Entries RSS” and bookmark that new page in your web browser. To subscribe to the comments portion of this blog, you would click the button titled “Subscribe to Comments RSS” and bookmark that new page in your web browser.

I hope you’ll subscribe to my RSS feeds, and stay up to date with all that’s happening.