My CEO Life

A friend of mine sent the following link to me from the Educators Corner of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. (http://edcorner.stanford.edu/podcasting.shtml)

These are a series of very interesting podcasts from innovative Chief Executive Officers from across the technology industry. These podcasts cover leadership, entrepreneurship and how these speakers have become leaders in their industries.

The one i have just listened to is by Marissa Mayer (VP Search Products and User Experience @ Google). She shared these insights that are critical to product development at Google.

1. Ideas from everywhere. Encourage and enable idea flow and incubation. Don’t assume it will happen naturally.
2. Share all info. Provide tools/forums that make it easy to share info freely and widely internally.
3. If you’re great, we’ll hire you.
4. Provide a license to pursue dreams. 50% of new products comes from the 20% free time discipline (i.e. 4x more productive than regular time!)
5. Don’t perfect on the drawing board. Innovate and iterate (quickly).
6. Ask users thru playing with real product.
7. Data is apolitical. Data creates clarity. Use split tests all the time if you’re not sure.
8. Creativity loves constraint. Don’t start with a white sheet of paper. Set clear goals and objectives from Day 1.
9. Users not money. Money follows the users. Always.
10. Don’t kill products. Morph them into something different and better.