Sigh. The problem with doing a book is that you hold stuff back, hoping it’ll stay fresh for the book, and then suffer death by a thousand little cuts. Such is the case of today’s NYT story on Google’s Founders Awards, which I discussed with Sergey a while back.
The idea is neat: reserve millions of dollars in value for teams of people within Google who make major contributions to the success of the company. Basically, Google wanted to create a culture within the company that rewards people on par with the returns someone receives when they start a successful company, then sell it – to a company like Google, for example. I think it’s innovative and rather bold – an acknowledgment that Google is maturing, but still committed to the kind of upsides that Valley startups are all about.
BTW, Google reports earnings today.
OK, back to the final chapter.
What if Google were to give each employee or even end user some virtual money (e.g. googal’s.) Each investor invests in a companies or technologies that will be to the benefit of the Google.
Then google could use its own social networking algorithms (page rank) to determine the most popular votes, and thus potential strategic investments. This way many thousands of little voices can get heard in the board room.
A relativley easy task to complete for employee’s, but imagine if they could to it with 60 million users.
Alternativley they could just develop a new algo that mines the web for share / technology predictions and print a investment table – actually isn’t this what web fountain is.
Keep going John! Finish that book! Here is a short piece on blook writing and blogging:
http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/the_blogbook_writing_paradox.php
And one from Kevin Kelly:
http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/kevin_kelly_on_book_writing_and_blogging.php
Check Russ’ blog for a bunch of odd posts on how this is somehow a bad thing.