Rented Out Her Garage , Made $300 million

What one small step you take today could lead to a multi-million dollar chain reaction? That’s what happened to Susan Wojcicki when she was 30 years old: “I had just got out of business school and bought a house. So I needed to get some renters in order to help pay the mortgage...”

So she rented our her garage to two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used it to start up their new company, Google.

Susan remembers the first year, with many “late nights together in the garage eating pizza and M&Ms, where (Larry and Sergey) talked to me about how their technology could change the world."

They finally convinced her to join as Employee No.18 and their first marketing manager, when she was four months pregnant. First job? Relocate them all to a proper office.

Called the “Mom at Google”, Susan was the first in the team to have a baby, and her “family first” philosophy led to Google topping the ‘Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For’ list.

The “family” grew, literally, with Sergey Brin marrying Susan’s sister, Anne, and having two kids. Susan herself had five kids. All while growing the marketing side of Google.

In charge of products, it was Susan who came up with the idea of Adsense, which grew to become 97% of Google’s revenue within the next 10 years. That earned Susan the nickname “The Money.”

She then focused at video, only to find a new start-up, Youtube, was growing much faster than Google video.

While working out what to do to compete, Susan stumbled on a Youtube video of two boys in China lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys. She recalls “That was the video that made me realize that 'Wow, people all over the world can create content, and they don’t need to be in a studio.”

Instead of trying to compete, Susan convinced Larry and Sergey to buy Youtube, and six months later Google bought Youtube for $1.65 billion.

In February 2014, Susan became the CEO of Youtube, and today she is worth $300 million.

What began with a simple decision to rent out her garage has led Susan on a journey that has included being named No.1 on the Adweek 50 list in 2013, being called “The most important person in advertising” and “The most powerful woman on the Internet” by TIME in 2015.

And for Susan, the journey is still just beginning. As she says, “Google is fascinating, and the book isn't finished. I'm creating, living, building, and writing those chapters.”

Now it’s your turn. If Susan can do it (while raising five kids) you can too.

Take a step forward today.

Any step.

There’s no guarantee it will lead to the same magical journey that Susan has been on.

But there’s no guarantee it won’t, either.

The Monk Moment

The Monk Moment - Many great entrepreneurs have had a moment when they have lost everything. Monks create this situation intentionally through "Vairagya" when they give up all money and possessions. Many entrepreneurs end up in the same situation unintentionally. :-)

Elon Musk lost $180M and was in debt in 2008. Seven years later, he's worth $13 billion, but he'd be ready to risk it all again. Steve Jobs lost his entire Apple fortune by 1994, betting it on NeXT and Pixar. In 1995 everything turned around, he sold NeXT to Apple, Pixar to Disney and he passed away an icon. Walt Disney mortgaged away his entire fortune in the 1950s to build Disneyland, against everyone's advice. He too went from giving up everything to becoming a legend. Each bet everything material they had on something invisible - their purpose and vision.

Monks call the state that comes after giving up everything "Moksha" which means liberation from the illusion. We're not alive until we know what we'd die for.

I'm not saying great entrepreneurs are monks, but they do have 'monk moments' when they lose everything.

Many of the greatest entrepreneurs unintentionally find themselves in this state by betting everything on their dream. Maybe you're in this place right now. It is a place of pure power. When you have nothing to lose, you have infinite potential.

That is provided you don't focus on what you've lost, but on everything you have to gain. That's when everything turns around. As Walt Disney said "I don't make movies to make money. I make money to make movies".
That's the paradox of entrepreneurs having a 'near-death' experience where they lose it all. Steve Jobs wrote:

“Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

What mission is so important to you, that you'd be ready to clear out the old and make way for your new?

Pokémon GO

How long does it take to create an overnight success? For John Hanke it’s taken him 20 years to create Pokémon Go.
This week, the Pokémon Go app has broken all records, with 10 million+ downloads in the first week, exceeding Twitter in daily active users, and with higher average user time than Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram & WhatsApp.

How did John Hanke create such a massive overnight craze? Here’s the 10 times he levelled up in his lifetime to reach Pokémon Go:

1st Level up: In 1996, while still a student, John co-created the very first MMO (massively multiplayer online game) called ‘Meridian 59’. He sold the game to 3DO to move on to a bigger passion: mapping the world.

2nd Level up: In 2000, John launched ‘Keyhole’ to come up with a way to link maps with aerial photography, and create the first online, GPS-linked 3D aerial map of the world.

3rd Level up: In 2004, Google bought Keyhole and with John’s help, turned Keyhole into what is now ‘Google Earth’. That’s when John decided to focus at creating GPS-based games.

4th Level up: John ran the Google Geo team from 2004 to 2010, creating Google Maps and Google Street View. During this time, he collected the team that would later create Pokémon Go.

5th Level up: In 2010, John launched Niantic Labs as a start-up funded by Google to create a game layer on maps. John explains why he called it Niantic:

“The Niantic is the name of a whaling ship that came up during the gold rush and through a variety of circumstances got dragged on shore. This happened with other ships, too. Over the years, San Francisco was basically just built over these ships. You could stand on top of them now, and you wouldn't know it. So it's this idea that there's stuff about the world that's really cool but even though it's on the Internet, it's hard to know when you're actually there.”

6th Level up: In 2012, John then created Niantic’s first geo-based MMO, “ingress”:

John explains: “In the case of Ingress the activity is layered on top of the real world and on your phone. The inspiration was that it was something that I always used to daydream about while I was commuting back and forth from home to Google."

"I always thought you could make an awesome game using all the Geo data that we have. I watched phones become more and more powerful and I thought the time would come that you could do a really awesome real-world adventure-based game.”

7th Level up: In 2014, Google and the Pokémon Company teamed up for an April Fools’ Day joke, which allowed viewers to find Pokémon creatures on Google maps. It was a viral hit, and got John thinking the idea could be turned into a real game.

8th Level up: John decided to build Pokémon Go on the user-generated meeting points created by players of Ingress, and the most popular became the Pokéstops and gyms in Pokémon Go:

As John says, ”The Pokéstops are submitted by users, so obviously they're based on places people go. We had essentially two and a half years of people going to all the places where they thought they should be able to play Ingress, so it's some pretty remote places. There are portals in Antartica and the North Pole, and most points in between.”

9th Level up: John raised $25 million from Google, Nintendo, the Pokémon Company and other investors from Dec 2015 to Feb 2016 to grow a team of 40+ to launch Pokémon Go this year.

10th Level: John and his team launched Pokémon Go on July 6th in USA, Australia and New Zealand. Since its launch, Nintendo’s share price has risen $12 billion, and the app is already generating over $2 million daily in in-app purchases, making it an overnight phenomenon.

The overnight success of Pokémon Go has taken John Hanke 20 years to create. Throughout these 20 years, while he had a big vision of a game layer over the world, he didn’t know what form it would take. At every step, he just focused at his next level up.

At each new level, he had new powers, new team members, and new items in his inventory…

Are you, like John, treating your own entrepreneurial journey like one big MMO?

Keep the end in mind, but focus today on simply levelling up.

At every level, grow your powers, your team, and your luck.

And know it takes many levels to win the game.

“It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.” ~ Eddie Cantor

Best advice if you're just starting or growing a business

Best advice if you're just starting or growing a business:

Focus at your customer more than your product. Get fixed on your customer experience, and your product will keep changing to serve them best. But fix your product, and customers will find a path that fits them, with or without you.

If you're waiting on the street corner, wondering where all your customers are, this post is for you.

We've moved from the industrial age where it was all about the product and productization to the technological age where it's all about the customer and customization.

Instead of focusing at product development and production lines (which we learned about and were a part of at school), focus at customer experiences and customization lines.

Your business doesn't start when you have a product. It starts when you have a customer. So who is your perfect customer? Start from there and ask yourself (and them):

Problem - What's the problem they need solved?
Promise - What's the benefit you deliver to them by solving it?
Product - How will you solve it better than others?
Proof - Why should they trust you?

Keep upgrading your answers (and your products) regularly. Because what your customers need, their expectations and how they are being served will keep changing fast. And once you get into flow, you'll begin to know what they need before them, and they'll begin pre-buying your next product.

"Get closer than ever to your customer. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves." ~ Steve Jobs

The easiest way to future proof your business is to have customers that love you. The easiest way to fail is to love your idea or product more than you love your customers. So find your soul-market and fall in love all over again.

The Billion Dollar Tweet

Here’s a tweet Travis Kalanick sent in January 2010. The reply from Ryan Graves happened 3 minutes later. That tweet was worth over a billion dollars.

January 2010 was the month Travis was doing a test run with 3 cars in New York for a mobile app that he and his friend, Garrett Camp, had just created.

They had decided it was time to start a company around the app and, needing to find a GeneralManager to run it, Travis took to Craigslist and Twitter looking for the right person.

Ryan’s reply to Travis came as he was looking for something new. He had some experience at GE, and had worked for Foursquare for a while for free after the company turned him down for a job. He was ready for a new opportunity - and took a chance with this tweet.

Travis replied back, they met, they hit it off, and Ryan joined Travis and Garrett on March 1st as their first hire.

With their new company started, the three of them then invited all their friends to demo the product and they officially launched in San Francisco just 3 months later on May 31st.

That was five years ago.

This week, the team that started with that tweet has built their company, Uber, into a company that is currently valued at over $60 billion (they just announced another funding round of $2 billion this week http://bit.ly/ubers-next-2-billion).

Today, Travis and Ryan are worth over $6 billion, and that tweet from Ryan (who today is Uber’s Head of Global Operations) began a journey which has made him a billionaire today as well.

How are you using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube today?

As a wall of content? As a broadcasting tool?

Or, like Travis and Ryan, as a way to find the resources, connections and opportunities you need when you need them?

Depending on how you use it, social media can make you feel apart from everyone, or one step to anyone.

It can overwhelm you, or empower you.

It can be a time waster, or a time saver.

“Never confuse motion with action.”
~ Benjamin Franklin

What do you need or who can you help today? It may just be a tweet away.

Of course, there is no promise that one connection or one tweet will result in you making a billion dollars or impacting a billion lives.

But there is no promise it won’t either.