“What if we just buy a car with a camera on it and then drive it on every street in the entire world?"
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It is 2004 and you are in a conference room. Big enough to host a small house party. There are a few whiteboards, half-finished thoughts from last week still unerased. There is a buzz in the air.
You see this conference room every week. It is the place where you meet with “key stakeholders” to review progress on beating Mapquest, the main competitor to the product you work on: Google Maps.
The meetings are boring, but you like them. You have worked your ass off for the past three years at Google to be the kind of person who gets to give presentations here. You feel good about it.
As for the work itself? Most of what you have done at Maps can be described as “optimizing.” Making better buttons. Changing the colors. Speeding up the website. The title of your presentation this week is Three Key Areas We Can Beat Mapquest, and it includes some more ideas about optimizing.
You present. There is some head-nodding. You are satisfied.
And then we return to the scene from the beginning.
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Larry Page, co-founder of the company, frowns.
“Idea for you,” he says. “What if we just buy a car with a camera on it that drives on every street around the entire world? Like literally every street. The side streets. Rural roads. Then a user would be able to get a car’s POV of any road in the world. Wouldn’t that be cool? I bet Mapquest won’t do that.”
“Why?” you ask, your presentation somewhat deflated.
“Well, we’re an information company. Our mission is to get all the information in the world in one place. Maybe it means buying cars and having humans drive them around the world to map all of the roads. I mean, it’s not that crazy. We could call it Street View.”
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You leave the meeting in a strangely reflective state. You would never have come up with that idea, and if you had, you would have discarded it long before it made it into your weekly presentation. But as soon as Larry said it, well, it didn’t sound that crazy. It just sounded like buying cars and driving them around.
About a year later, you decided to quit Google. Mapquest came to you with a bigger offer, and you didn’t feel much progress was being made on the ‘not so crazy’ idea at Google.
One year into that new job, you came across a blog post from Google:
Introducing… Street View!
Wow, they really did it, you think. You feel a little proud and a little embarrassed to not still be there. You read the blog post and then wonder…
What other ideas are not that crazy?
— —
If you want to be realistic, you can debate this story. Maybe you should. Google Street View is real, but the story is made up and maybe it didn’t go this way. (If you were in the room and know how it went, email us.) If it didn’t go this way, if the team was always thinking of these crazy ideas and Street View wasn’t an outlier, then that’s even better. (And maybe more companies should follow suit.)
It also may be true that if you interviewed at Google in 2004 and pitched the Street View idea, you would not have been hired. Packaging matters, and ideas that have an Important Person label attached to them are treated differently than ideas from low-level grunts. This is probably bad. Organizations should just pursue the best ideas. Not all crazy ideas are good, and some founders have too many (bad) crazy ideas that organizations waste a lot of time and money pursuing because they were told to do so.
I’ll leave you with one other thing to consider: Was Google Street View a great idea? It certainly was for the future existence of Geoguessr. But was it clear that Street View was an effective path to making Google a lot more profit? I’m not sure. But it’s interesting that it exists. And, really, it’s not that crazy.