The Hunger Games — Advice to Leaders — Driving Innovation

My friend Lorraine Twohill sent me this speech she and i worked on when i was at Google, thanks! I think its ok for me to post it now, in case people find it useful :).

THE HUNGER GAME

NIKESH @ STREAM

Look where we are. This is pretty nice, right. We’ve made it. It’s easy to feel very happy with ourselves, very comfortable, very complacent. I’m here to talk about why this can be a dangerous thing. And why we can never afford to lose our hunger. Normally with a crowd like this, we use the word hunger in the context of global poverty or famine.

Today I want to talk about it in the context of personal hunger.

Let’s start with this question. How many of you grew up with nothing to your name in life? How many people grew up in a well-to-do family? I’m not saying that the people who grew up with something in their life are not as hungry as people who grew up with less. But I know for the people who had nothing, they were trying to get somewhere in life, they were trying to aspire for something.

This is a question which a lot of us will have to face when our kids grow up. I have a daughter. She’s 17. I sit there and wonder: How do I create the same amount of hunger in her that I had when I first came to the US? Because, when I was that age, I had no choice. I could not turn back. I borrowed from my father in India. I borrowed $5,000 and that’s all the money he had. I knew he was 58. He was going to retire. I had to figure out a way to find $5,000 and make him proud and give it back to him before he retired; otherwise, I’d taken away his life savings.

And I’m not the only one with a story like that.

Today we are surrounded by new sets of business leaders — passionate founders, who against all odds, achieve great things. They are driven from within. They build small teams who perform against the odds. They find inspiration, motivation, tenacity. They are restless. They are hungry. Even in crowded, mature markets, we see this happen the world over. One person can take on the establishment because of a different point of view and because of hunger.

Elon Musk taught himself computer programming at the age of 12. He shook up the car industry with Tesla, proving a new model could work. He’s now doing it again with SpaceX, building rockets at a fraction of the time and cost by designing, testing and fabricating the majority of components in-house. Driven by hunger.

Or Ursula Burns, the CEO of Xerox. She grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City amongst gangs and drug addicts. Despite their poverty, her mother insisted that all her children get a college education. It paid off. She was the first African-American woman to run a Fortune 500 company. Hunger.

Another person I admire very much: Masa Son from SoftBank. He has tireless hunger. He is still the same as when he was a high school student with no English just off the plane. He is still today driven by hunger — by a sense of urgency and ability to think big and take risks.

And hunger has been a big part of Google’s history.

Googlers are some of the most hungry people I know, especially the engineers. It’s in their nature to see the world differently — and ask why.

Look at the journey of Maps as a case study. When we created this, there were already lots of mapping tools around and maps have existed since time began. Why did a small team think they could map the whole world and create something new and more useful? Hunger.

Then came Street View. There’s a guy at Google called Dan Fredinburg. He and a few other brave Googlers, spent 12 days in the mountains battling altitude sickness, an earthquake, mudslides, snow storms and flash floods to capture Street View imagery of the world’s highest peaks including Mount Everest. What drives them? Hunger.

And the latest chapter in our quest to map the physical world: Self-driving cars. This project was born out of a desire to reduce the number of needless deaths on the road every year. What makes a small committed team keep going on a very long term, almost impossible quest? Hunger. And at the end of the day, self-driving cars won’t get road rage.

Very often, the one difference between two smart people is hunger. But how do you keep organizations hungry?

It’s something I think about as we get bigger at Google. Is there a risk of complacency? How do you grow and scale and also keep people fired up and motivated. Three things I have learned at Google as we scale:

First, take bigger bets as you get bigger, not smaller. Too often as companies get bigger they get more risk averse. You need to invert the risk curve. As an example, people thought we were crazy when we bought YouTube for $1.65B. People said bandwidth costs would cripple YouTube’s profit potential and questioned our decision. But we bet on a future where bandwidth costs would fall rapidly — and YouTube is now a huge success.

Second, reward failure…and learn from it. This is very much the valley way, people open to investing in founders who have failed before, because of what they learned. Likewise it’s important in a company to recognise and reward people for what they tried to achieve, even if it didn’t work out. This is harder than you think as people tend to worry about protecting their jobs and look to allocate blame. All you then get is a very closed and cautious culture. So I tell my team, it’s okay to fail. I have no problem with people in my team failing as long as they have tried their best. I believe it is okay. You will lose a few. But you got to give it all you got.

Third, scarcity breeds invention. Full stomachs don’t create hunger. At Google we create small teams which helps us move quickly. And we give them crazy, audacious goals. As Larry would say “uncomfortably excited”. I’ve been at Google for ten years and the company still has this sense of urgency. There’s still the feeling that there is more work, more opportunity than there are people and hours in day. This keeps everyone hungry, keeps them focused. There’s a constant belief that there’s more for us to do in the world; we’re only at the beginning. Even though Google’s 15 years in, and I’m 10 years in, there’s still this feeling that there’s so much to do.

So to sum up, I believe we should never lose our hunger. We should keep a relentless pursuit of the impossible. It’s essential for our survival.

Thank you.