Permission to be Curious
Innovation is rarely a consensus undertaking. Here’s a classic example from Google’s hallowed halls.
“A large number of people thought it was a really bad thing to spend our talents on,” said Georges Harik, a top engineer and one of Google’s first ten employees. He is, of course, referring to AdSense, which now generates more than $10,000,000,000 annually (I like to write the zeroes out on very big numbers).
Given the internal resistance the concept faced from the beginning, I was surprised to discover the unexpected pieces that came together to enable AdSense to reach escape velocity. As Steven Levy describes in his landmark biography, In The Plex, its success is due in part to Google’s founders’ willingness to allow folks to pursue side projects.
Early in its life, AdSense ran into a major snag: it couldn’t, you know, actually pay publishers.
“Brin wanted to launch a pilot version quickly and have the full program running by May. Google didn't even have a payment system in place to distribute the commissions to publishers. The only thing close to such an in-house scheme was the method used in a search backwater called Google Answers, an ill-fated experiment that let users bypass algorithms for tough queries and instead solicit answers from anonymous fellow users, who would be paid small sums for satisfactory responses. The new project used that payment system.”
The team that developed Google Answers had solved the payment problem for a solution that was no good! The project had lain idle for quite some time, seemingly waiting for the heroic moment to swoop in and solve a key problem for AdSense.
It’s hard to predict how projects will co-inform one another — and there are doubtless countless counterpoints citing abandoned experiments that never amounted to much — but it’s fairly safe to say that a good way to quench the inventive spirit is to squash curiosity. The most inventive people need a little permission to indulge their wonderings.
Related: Entertain Trivialities
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The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.