If I had to summarize it, I would say that the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. We start companies to build products that serve people, not to sit in meetings with lawyers.  You need to be able to answer the "what have I done for our users today" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech.

being part of a Corporation means that the signal to noise ratio changes dramatically.  The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus. After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users. An ever increasing percent of our time went to non user value creation tasks and that changes the DNA of the company quickly, from customer focused to corporate guidelines focused.

the salaries are so high and the options so valuable that it creates many misalignments.  The impact of an individual product on the Corp-Tech stock is minimal so equity is basically free money.  Regardless of your performance (individually) or your product performance, you equity grows significantly so nothing you do has real economic impact on your family. The only control you have to increase your economic returns are whether you get promoted, since that drives your equity and salary payments.  This breaks the traditional tech model of risk reward.

The VP in charge of Google Plus hosted the Friday all-hands several times to get us all excited about what they were building. It was obvious to me and many others that there was no reason for people already on Facebook to switch from Facebook. Someone asked a direct question, but the VP deflected and talked about how easy it would be to group your friends with the Circles feature — which was not at all a reason to switch.It seemed like Google didn’t have the processes or experience to get the product strategy right. “Who are our potential users and what does it take to win them?” is product strategy 101. Maybe someone raised this question in an exec review, but it didn’t become a launch blocker. Google+ never took off, and was eventually shut down.

If Google didn’t start with a conviction that they needed the product, it makes sense that they wouldn’t have the stamina to keep iterating and investing. Most other companies don’t have the money to build and launch products with such little conviction and oversight. Other companies need their products to succeed, so they try harder & smarter to make the products successful.

IME people often don’t realize that product strategies are actually way more important and influential than company strategies. Simply because it’s the products that have an impact on people’s lives, not the company.

Google has a company strategy, but they don’t make product strategies.

Google’s company strategy is “Hire all the smart people.” Hire all the smart people and let them build. Hire all the smart people so they can’t work at a competitor. Hire all the smart people even if we don’t have something important for them to work on.Google acts like a venture capitalist, investing in promising people with the expectation that most will fail. They invest broadly in search of the idea that will deliver 100x. Let 1000 flowers bloom, and see which are the best.