If you’re trying to be “take over the world, but do no evil” successful, it turns out there’s a company that you should know about. That, of course, is Google.
They probably referred you to this blog, changed your life in the last 10 years, and have the potential to change the world (if they haven’t already). Fortunately David A. Vise and Mark Malseed spent extended periods of their lives on teaching us exactly how Google started, including everything from Burning Man, to company culture, to IPO.
The book does a great job showing exactly which elements attributed to their success and lends many great advice points for running your own business, such as never settling for anything less than what you expect. And to put yourself and your company in a situation where others are interested in you. Having the upper hand in the VC process kept the Google founders in control of the company, and even allowed them to change the way Wall Street IPOs had been done for years.
Don’t read this book if you want information about anything later than Gmail, though. Although there has been an updated edition, it is not much more current than the first story. You’ll find plenty of information about adwords, pagerank, search, and changing the way we know the internet. But, you will not find anything about Google’s current war with Microsoft (Google OS, and Bing, that is), or Google Analytics, or Wave, or any of the crazy Google products that we know them for today.
Regardless, there’s a lot to learn. So go pick up the book.
