Robert X. Cringely has written an interesting piece titled “The Final Days of Google: It is going to be an inside job” which looks at where the next Google killer will come from. He believes that by the way Google structures itself, with employees dedicating 20% of their time to their own projects they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction:

Google is an amazing entrepreneurial Petri dish. Yet at the same time, it is doomed to disappoint nearly every entrepreneurial type who works there.

He’s right, Google works hard to hire the best, it has also aquired a number of startups that have good entrepreneurs, technical experts or in some cases both. This talent is then given 20% of their time to work on their own projects. At a conservative estimate they’re going to be working on several thousand projects of which Google can probably only progress between 5 and 10 a year (if Google Labs is anything to go by they’ve been averaging around 3 per year) meaning they’ll be rejecting (and disappointing the person behind) several thousand new business ideas per year.

Given that we all believe our business ideas are the best, it’s likely that some of the people there will feel their idea is being stifled by Google and they may believe (and quite possibly be right) that it’s an amazing business opportunity. Now while making the leap from having an idea for a business to actually implementing it is not a leap that most employees will take, mainly due to fear of failure, Google employees are different.

The reason Google’s employees are different? Well Google’s employees recieve stock options with a 4 year vesting period and as the employees reach their vesting period they will be able to exercise their options making hundreds, if not thousands of them into millionaires, at which point they have little to fear from quitting to pursue their own business ideas and many have the independent funds to allow them to build their own world beating business.

There’s a precedent for this too, a lot of employees at Microsoft during the 80s became millionaires and then subsequently left to pursue their own businesses. Some would even argue that the Dodgeball founders quiting Google was one of the first examples of this happening at Google. The Dodgeball founder left because:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. And while it was a tough decision (and really disappointing) to walk away from dodgeball, I’m actually looking forward to getting to work on other projects again.

You can read their own word on it here.

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