My 3 Takeaways from "I'm Feeling Lucky" by Douglas Edwards

🔖 Summary in 3 Sentences

This book shows you the early days of Google. How they grow from a small tech startup to the giant we know today. All these through the perspective of an early employee of Google.

‍🧑🏻 Who Should Read It?

Anyone interested in the starting of Google. Or anyone running a tech startup.

🔑 My 3 Key Takeaways

Focus on the product.

If we can't win on quality, we shouldn't win at all.

This is one of the quotes that struck me in this book. Google is having fierce competition with other search companies, but they don't like to do advertisements to get people to use them. The founders think winning by marketing will be deceitful because this means people are tricked into using an inferior service against their best interest. So in the early days, the founders won't spend a dime in marketing and spend all their money in hiring the brightest mind in engineering, in order to create the best search engine in the world. And they did it. Focus on your product, and you will win in the long run.

The right and wrong.

When I first arrived at Google, I felt strongly about things and was often wrong. Fortunately, Larry and Sergey ignored my ideas.

The author is a 41 years old guy coming from a big company when he first joins Google. There's a lot of decision that he thinks it's absurd. But it's all those bold decisions that make Google successful today. In the last year of his career at Google, they are experimenting with a social network idea called Orkut. But they are too afraid of making mistakes and dragging on the development of it. In the end, Facebook becomes the social network that everyone knows today, not Orkut. If they remained the spirit of the early day Google, they might get a seat in the social network market.

Work vs Life.

I had started at a small startup as a big-company guy. Now I was leaving a big company as a small-startup guy.

The author work for 5 years in Google. When he joined, the company got 50+ employees. When he leaves, the company already exceeds 1000 employees. The early Google teaches him to be bold in taking on big challenges, that everything is possible. They work for long hours for a long time in the early days. But in the last year of his career in Google, the company grow so big that he becomes one of the cogs in the system. In the end, the company told him his position is not needed by the company anymore.

💭 Afterthought

This book gives me a lot of thinking for my own startup. When they are small, they do what they can to make things happen. There's a lot of competition in the market, and they stay focused on their technology. When everyone is chasing the money, they chase for the quality. In the end, they build the best search engine in the market. So don't lose focus, stay on your course to build the best team, and best product.

🛍 How to Buy?

I bought this book on Shopee's BigBadWolf for RM11. It worth a read.

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