Kara Swisher AllThingsD panel at AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford Tech Startup Entrepreneurship 2008

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Kara Swisher AllThingsD panel AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford Tech Startup Entrepreneurship

This panel, moderate by Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal / AllThingsD, discussed how very large companies like Google can avoid falling victim to "big company problems".

The panelists were:

Kathy Eisenhardt, Asherman Professor and co-Director STVP, Stanfor

Shona Brown, SVP Business Operations, Google

Microsoft: cited as a problem case - overly centralized.

Intel: another example; so great in their mainline business, but fundamentally unable to diversify.

Swisher: Google also focuses on one way of making money.

Brown: We're working on a bunch of other businesses, many of them would be very substantial software companies as stand-alone units.

Swisher: Microsoft just lost close to $500M in their online business unit... again.

Eisenhardt: as a big company, you have a lot of trouble striking the balance between business units.

Brown: a lot of companies stop experimenting; they are uncomfortable with failing. You have to be very deliberate in that regard. What do you do when you have a terrific core business with immense opportunity, to encourage your talent to stick with that? At Google, we have so many challenging problems in our core business there are many terribly hard problems left to solve. No black and white answers.

Swisher: Amazon a great example of a creative, innovative company driven by the founder/leader, willing to experiment.

Eisenberg, yes but the more structured vs creative entrepreneurs are often the long-term winners (studies cited).

Swisher: advice for Facebook?

Eisenhardt: They should be looking for what is working or not as launched in a new country; learning heuristics, timing etc.

Discussion about turnaround theories, etc.

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My take: this was a solid panel featuring excellent speakers, but lacked a powerful focal point for debate or analysis; I found it to be a bit theoretical.

Shona Brown of Google was most impressive - watch for her name in a big press release before too long. On the other hand, where do you go after

running a good part of Google, the most successful, profitable, and fun "tech startup turned giant company" ever created?

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