Why I left Google
By Asha

Douwe Osinga ran his company Oberon Medialab before Google hired him.  During his many years at the tech giant, Douwe had a stint at Google Hyderabad as well.

In the first of a series of blog posts, Douwe had written about all the reasons anyone should work for Google.  The next post is the opposite and about good reasons to leave Google anyway, and it makes for fascinating reading as it is a first hand account of a person who spent many years at Google.

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Leaving Google - part 2
 
Google thinks Big

If you pitch an idea or a project to Larry and Sergey, their feedback is quite easy to anticipate. They'll tell you have to solve the problem in a more generic way. I tried to sell them on data communities, a place where like minded people could collaborate on structured data around topics they're interested in. The feedback was predictable: why restrict yourself to communities? And why to structured data? Come up with something that solves everything!

Thinking big sounds great, but most big ideas start small and go from there. Google itself started from the notion that it would be interesting to look at back links for pages. Twitter started out as hardly more than a group SMS product that also works online. Facebook explicitly restricted themselves at first to one university.

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