Episode 9: Writely (Google Docs)
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Who got? The true get. Easy you, easy you, you sit me down, say.

Welcome back to episode nine of acquired the show where we talk about technology acquisitions that actually went well. I'm been gilbert, David and wear your hosts this week, we're going to be covering an older acquisition. But following a theme from our last episode in productivity software, we're gonna covering the what became the eventual sweet known as google drive, google dogs, google sheet and google presentation.

google slides slide. I think it's started as presentation. yeah.

And then I was presentation, spread sheet and docks with .

the product of many names. Yes.

I will go through there. There are a whole ton of companies um that actually contributed the stable go through the acquisition history in facts but largely focused around rightly which of eventually can call dogs yes um reminder that if you enjoy the show uh leave us your view on itunes. We would love any feedback .

or you can hit us up on twitter that acquired F M.

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Yeah, so learn how you can put A I agents to work for your people by clicking the link in the shower notes or going to service now dot com slash A I dash agents. Now it's down in the show. David want to do acquisition history .

in facts has always been so dear listener's, let's transport back in time the mid two thousands web two doto areas in full swing. Ajax, the browser technology that enabled um that enabled live dynamic updating of website just come out and a group of uh a group of technologies from into IT had decided to start a little crew to double and what they could do with ajax.

So they found IT a company that they called up startle, I love that name, so bubble, so web to that um and they ran through a couple of projects and landed on a products that they called lately. And IT was collaborative document editing in the cloud. I don't know, they called IT that at the time.

yeah, which now seems so.

Table sticks solution, founded by sam shala, caught a carpenter and Steve newman. And they worked on IT for a couple years. IT was in beta.

Uh they had a few thousand users uh and then in march two thousand six, google announced that they had acquired the company for an undisclosed amount rumored in the ten million dollar range. What interesting. They're only hired one person over those two years.

So was the three founders and one other into a employ former into an employee gender mazan. Um and they all joined google and became pm in google dox. And what's interesting is that um this was actually the second acquisition that google had made in their online office productivity sweet. Uh the first was another company, a smaller company in the new york called two u web, two web technologies that theyd actually quired in two thousand five that was working on excel two web。

That was something that they brought google labs right? And I think google labs and created the first google spread sheet before google locks google dog is launched.

Yes, and this was all happening right around the same time. So google spread sheet launched in labs in june two thousand. Sex rightly was acquired in march two thousand six um and then shortly there after in the beginning of two thousand seven in google ducks based on rightly was released publicly.

Was docks and spread sheet actually merged right around that time? And you can go to dot google dot com and the the I member, the head or actually said oogly dogs and spread sheet one big long thing and IT looked like they just kind like took the spread sheet view and just interjected the some of your docks and there you could sort by day but that was pretty much all the integration they had.

And then um shortly after that launched a two more accompany companies google acquired in two thousand seven attack ic systems and center just an early White combination company both of the which were working on presentation software for the brothers is right .

tonic largely the back end and to a largely the front end and .

is very amazing how quickly google turn these acquisitions around. September two thousand and seven presentations is launched and finally there is now a full sweet of microsoft office ask productivity software in the cloud that's right.

But don't ask eric Smith that when they announced google dogs and spread sheet, he definitely told a dragani audience for of people that they were not indeed competing with microsoft and IT was not a computer to office .

I wonder if our last episode guest, curt, till benny was listening .

to yeah .

ah and and then some might say, you know the rest is history however, interesting side note of of history, two thousand and seven the same year these final acquisitions happened and the foul sweet was released by google. June two thousand seven drop boxes .

founded yeah and that's interesting. I mean, you look at the bet that google making here. I mean, this happens so fast, this all happens within a year and a half span.

And all the sudden they have a full kind of sweet here. And they they definitely went through and and made very strategic acquisitions here, but built a lot of IT in house. I think what they acquired was super bear bones in each of, at each of these applications, all pretty inexpensive.

I mean, these are all rumored approximate ten million dollar acquisitions. Last episode, we we were talking with kirk til beni, and we were looking at what microsoft paid for a company and wonder list and sunrise that the total somewhere around half a billion dollars. And when google was getting into to double in this game, which is the you really inventing the market for cloud productivity, um super cheap because that wasn't you know people weren't flocking there yet. People didn't realize that oh, I need collaboration tools in real time where I can look at the other person's cursor in my document. IT was IT was largely .

a toy at that point. You and I think these are all really interesting examples of the diverse is built that we were talking about with curt a little bit last week. Um and what's interesting and one of the reasons I brought up drop x being founded around then you know all these companies, these fivers e companies that google acquired that became the backbone of google ducks. There were all these rumors I don't know you remember ban around the time for years about the mythical g drive drive IT was coming. IT was coming .

was the dropbox killer.

IT was the dropbox killer. IT didn't launch until two thousand and twelve and and one could imagine we mentioned there was was an early why combination company as was dropbox. You know, how might history have been different? Have google have decided that they would accelerate their drive efforts by acquiring .

drive at the time? 嗯， very interesting.

alright. With that SHE move on the acquisition category. Yeah.

let's do IT because I think there's there's a lot of this episode i'm most interested in the fast fording to today and looking at, you know how does this impact of those businesses a whole. So I think yeah, let's happy to just blow right through acquisition history, in fact now onto acquisition category to me um technology. I think all these acquisitions, you know primarily um rightly, were these kind of experimental ax apps.

And everybody was seeing what they could do with ajax at the time, google maps. That was a very flashy demo example of that. And you know I think there are a few people later on either pad, but a few different companies playing around with collaborate editing. And I think content editable was the the new hottest thing and Brown or technology that, that they took advantage of. And you know this is this is just acquiring um sort of that the the people that we're doing that, right? And so I think you know a technology and people acquisition, knowing that there was a lot of technology to to build in how to really turn me into a product .

that was marketable. You um it's interesting, you know I was going to go with business line for this category. But this is such a know when we started doing this talk about doing the episode, we said he was gonna yond rightly. But as we were doing research, we realized you there are these really .

fiber's o companies one of too much further exactly.

And and I think it's really you, to me, critical zed, this being a classic, you know, google decided they wanted to get into the business of productivity apps and they wanted to take A A typically google bent on IT and put them in the browser instead of being installed software on your PC. And they decided to to get into this business and and made the judgment that buying was gonna a faster a faster way to get there than building in house.

Yeah sure. I feel like a case study in the viruses bill. I think I think that um dropping, let's say, fifty million dollars short cut of their time to market dramatically and put all that rain brain brain power and house right away here.

And what's interesting is it's also, I think, blending a little bit kind of the tech teams here. But and I don't know what google thought at the time in terms of their strategy. But as the the battleground for productivity software has really evolved from at that time, I was word and excel and powerpoint installed on your computer to now it's this whole sweet of you know not just those applications but also your email, also uh your your cloud services as as an organization.

I mean, what did you not only the third party software you're running, which is your email, which is your word processing, which is your spread sheet, but also your internal company apps that you're running on, whether that's A W S or google cloud engine or microsoft azure as that um really involved in the last few years. It's almost been this mix within google that they bought the traditional productivity software. But the email piece with email and cloud peace, which we can argue you know about how much success they've had their related to amazon, a built in house. interesting.

Yeah so. There's the question now of you know, before we get into what would have happened otherwise, David, do you think that google should have gotten into productivity at all? Like let let's let's zoom out look at google as a business, its advertising business primarily driven by Edwards and and you search and people click and go get a cut.

And you know that has always been their cash cow and for the foreseeable l future looks to be the large source of their revenue. Working backwards from that. You either have to believe that, that is at some point, not onna become their largest stream of revenue or that that's gonna rely on some data or some asset provided by could be customers by the TV applications IT. Does that makes sense for them to be in the productivity game at all?

Yeah, it's a good question. My sense is that um google for a long time has been looking for that.

What's next? Yeah I mean, in fact, there their revenues now are reported since they are alphabet now um we should be saying alphabet uh alphabet revenues now are reported as google and other bets like they're so fascinated with this whats the next you widget that they restructure their entire company, their reporting scheme and their leadership .

structure around IT. It's it's interesting and know microsoft had this chAllenge two for a long time mean, they were the windows company, the Operating system company for a long time, and I think perhaps longer than a lot of people would have expected. That has continued to be an incredible cash cow for them.

But now we're in the throws, as we talked for current last week about you know, what is microsoft today? It's a mobile first cloud first company is not an Operating system in office company. And for google, they're the search company. They've been the search company now for nearly twenty years.

And when wow I feel old .

yeah not quite twenty years, but eighteen years. Google is going to college, you know, google graduating from high school this year and they are going to college.

If we had a coin name for naming episodes, what we named this one.

And and and I think this is a big part of the question of what does google want to be when you grow up and and and actually think relevant other acquisition uh flashing forward today. H google recently acquired the company called bib up, which was founded by dan Green, who is the founder of the anywhere. And dian was on google board and and debt was nominated.

They hadn't released their product that was still in stealth, but nominally making productivity software for the enterprise. Now I don't think IT was word in excel type productivity software, but I was software um helping about helping enterprises build their applications and and dian is now taking over the entire cloud business for google. Yeah includes all google apps and google for work.

Yeah, it's interesting. Well, two directions I want to go with. The the first one is okay. Maybe they have clearly theyve been obsessed with big bets. The whole time I made google itself, that the core project background, the whole academic research project into organizing the world's information and releasing the the best search engine and the one that's the most sustainable on an ongoing basis.

Um you know that was an enormous bit and I think that now they're thinking totally crazy with these moonshot ideas when they started with google dogs and ninety and sorry and two thousand and six like they weren't doing self driving cars and they weren't doing balloons that deliver internet, they were doing a lot of these huge projects. So maybe this felt like a possible big bet to them for the future of their company. Looking at microsoft and seeing that productivity of that era was such a cash cow and is just now sort of dwarfed by how big they're thinking with all their current big bets. And this was sort like an early on possible big, big bet that we're seen that sort of legacy. Like i'm not sure google would go into the space starting today.

I agree um but it's just thing to go back to that time. And I wonder if google um have to be sitting here today in twenty sixteen. Microsoft, as much as they've had a resurgence in the last couple years, they're not as relevant in terms of the the most important strategic players in tao landscape and technology.

But IT going back to the mid two thousands with google looking at microsoft. And I wonder if they saw the windows office, you two legs of the the stool that not balancing stool and and thought gas those two core businesses in an Operating system and productivity and they thought about themselves and said, you know, if we want to be like microsoft, our analogy for Operating systems is search. We are the Operating system of the web what is the productivity on the web and and when you think about when they started google the acts um was what I was and and still is a little logic extent of this .

day yeah makes total sense in that context. And I think that um you know we're looking at this like three to five years ago rather than looking at IT today, i'd be sitting here preaching or like singing the the praises of google as this is one of the most classic examples ever of low end disruption. I mean, you have the the big thing that the enterprise people are buying with these companies that need every single last feature of office, even though when you given personally uses five percent of IT and most them use the same five percent, but you need all these features because that's how you get the big enterprise contract.

as you know. Well, did you stuff all hundred percent of the pics into .

office for ipad? no. Is fond. We get to rethink rethink the the light wake productivity. We call that which is super fine. But the the you know in in low disruption, you get this new this new person that comes along would go, in this case with google dox. Everything's a total toy IT doesn't have any of the features at the enterprise me, they're giving away for free.

But like at the end of the day, there are so many people that look at that real time collaboration available on the web. Cloud storage is like, wait, this is when we're important to me that all those old things that colloquially, everyone believed were necessary. And I think the difference of we're sitting today from a few years ago is I don't think IT fulfilled its lower disruption promise of unseeing the incoming. I mean, I I was all braced and ready for for office to become less relevant and google dogs to be the the future and them to slowly add on the rich feature set that people would call the new income.

But let me let me ask you, i'm curious you you guys started paying their square labs in twenty fifteen. Do you have on either your computers or via office, three sixty five word.

excel and power point? We do because of this Spark. Facebook is the microsoft program that that makes a lot of their software available for free .

to start up there. If you didn't have that, what you pay for those would you use just google acts at least a couple .

of us words just because um any of our legal documents are are gonna be changed in word and that needs to be um have perfect rendering um there are definitely still industries that require a high finality, perfect rendering of documents um but you know like anything that I opening that when i'm writing like a quick features spec, like a one page on an idea or uh a welcome document that we're gna send out to new users of our application or anything like that, it's all google dox.

So I I mean really i'd say like anything that I start from scratch these days as um the other direction that I wanted to go with that is when we were talking with kure last week and something that become completely obvious with with amazon's earnings break out of U S. That um you know azure is very much the future for microsoft. A W, S is already as profitable as an independent business as their entire e commerce businesses in a much shorter time period.

Ico soft with azure izon w lot interesting news in the last couple weeks with google and and google club platform. I think there there were some news that apple was moving. There just been a tremendous m apple developing their own um internal cloud are are their own cloud hardware.

Apple developing their own uh hardware to put in their own data centers and run their own cloud infrastructure. Um drop lock doing the same thing, I guess wrong going with this. In these cloud services, you can have these three layers, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and then soft as a service.

Each of these three players are microsoft, amazon and google have all the layers of the stack they started in different places. Amazon kind of with infrastructure, microsoft with all the way up with with software and google with originally, uh, google happening and with platform service. Do you think that as all of these businesses are betting on that being the cash cow the future, do all of them need all of the layers? Or would google be fine without productivity software and the software as a service?

It's interesting um this gets a little bit into maybe i'll just jump in to a uh you know my sort attack theme um as we've been describing you all of google strategic decisions around this business probably made perfect sense to that when they made them in them in two thousands and even up until a few years ago. But the landscape has changed and the battle ground has changed for what productivity is.

And that's why I brought up why you brought this up now and why I was mentioning earlier the sort of cloud and the infrastructures al layer um and I think bend the answer to your question is no and I think one need look no further than A W S to see that an AWS started as infrastructure. That's what they do. And of course, they've moved up the stack and add other things, but that's they are not offering email.

There is some amazon email but nobody and and yet they're still at least in, you know, inning number. Maybe we're an inning number two of cloud now there there pretty far and away. You know the leader and I would be it's interesting to think about like what could google i've done rather than copying the microsoft strategy in the mid two thousands of okay, we've got the court and court Operating system.

Now we're going to do productivity. What if they had instead fought amazon more directly at that point on the infrastructural layer? You're gone with another another aspect entirely trusting.

I think, with google, google apps and you were locking yourself like google's proprietory data storage and you had to use python IT was like they are when you are looking at the cloud services. And inning number one on the top half, the. The choices IT like wasn't apples to apples at all because you like why i'm going to either build for a google APP engineer or not.

I don't really get choices around that. Um or amazon IT looks like gives me just one level of the attraction about ve learning my own server, which I think is what I want you. And like IT was interesting how those two companies made enormously different bets there.

And amazon and you look at the the diversity of of companies and enterprises and workloads that that have adopted amazon over the past few years. And you mentioned drop x moving off of for the longest time, you know dropbox, you amazon kind of won the first round of this place across productivity because everybody used A W S. You know dropbox pay the amazon tax. There's a great strategic article, which does as our listeners know, we are both big fans of vandal's, but his article last week on the amazon tax is just fantastic.

Yeah yeah. And I before we move off this point, I want to revisit I when I say that the loan disruption, a machine sort of failed. Obviously, people use google dogs all over the place so we even talk about how I might go to um for the longest time.

But IT hasn't become a great business for no.

that's the thing like the there has been stagnation in google uh the adoption of google apps in the enterprise in a way that if they were really displaced in the incumbent, disrupting the income and the world would have moved to whatever their new set of features and a new um sort of market they were creating, the world would have needed those things. And that's not necessarily true from the monitise ation perspectives.

And instead actually, I mean, to bring back to our last episode, what you've seen happen is this resurgence of microsoft of the original winner in this space. You with created some expensive acquisitions that they made, you know as we discuss last week, alf, a billion or so in total but office three sixty five and now you know outlook uh and and outlook mobile um you a company are are winning huge .

share yeah yes, there is A I got ta find this real quick. There was an interesting or made here we go about a year and a half o google apps had double the market share of microsoft cloud offering, according to a research report by bit glass, the sixteen percent versus eight percent and hold onto people still using um on premise uh productivity and email software more recently um about six months ago, office three sixty five but jumped ahead of google labs twenty five percent rs twenty three percent and it's a thing where microsoft got their act together in in office three sixty five and building the the cloud productivity tools and like to be honest, I so I worked on um what was then office web word web APP before they were called a office online is actually my internship at at microsoft and like I was a joke compared to google dogs. I mean I was writing specks and looking at google dogs for, like, what? How did they do IT as a reference, and then figuring out.

can we do IT Better? P, not a place, not a good place to be as .

a product team. No, no. We were totally like a trying to fast follow, but built on much older infrastructure. And I was I was kind of a nightmare. And what's happened is, is really like the native clients on all platforms at microsoft had become excEllent for building and buying. And the the the cloud applications have have you know held their own and you can do real time collaboration now with with microsoft applications. And even if the user experience, which in my opinion of their cloud applications is still below google, they're at least able to tell that started to the enterprise .

and and we have out. And what's really interesting here is that I don't think anyone would argue that, you know, the cloud versions of word, excel and powerpoint are .

greater.

beating a goole. Microsoft is still capturing the majority of the value in productivity. Google is capturing almost zero right now terms of the dollars being spent by enterprises and individuals on productivity. And amazon is just taking attacks on everybody else.

Yes, god, this is such a good case. Study in incense mean, I think like if i'm ever strugling to understand a business, take a step back and saying, what is every party incentivise to do brings instant clearly microsoft is a productivity company, Operating system productivity company and you broad OA system broadly to find that will become something much more cloud or um google is an advertising company and its not like this lower disruption was coming from the the of the company that represents the future of productivity.

IT was coming from an advertising company looking for their next thing. So when push comes to shop, microsoft needs to defend their castle. And they worked offending IT against a productivity upstart. They were defending IT against an advertising company that was looking at IT as sort of an afterthought. So my opinion the atrophy of of um google dogs in in fighting that war or in fighting whatever war they should be fighting where it's going is largely because they have problems to think about in the future their advertising business what that means as they transition from the just top to mobile. And I mean, we've been at all, I think, to stay away from there.

But like said.

yeah, they have advertising problems that they need to address. There are more serious.

It's a great point. I mean, think about IT this way, like your Larry page, jeff bezos and Steve bomber and 能 咋 见得 了？ Like what how much is productivity on your mind？ Like what percentage of your mind share does that jet is? Is probably zero a and in Larry page, you know I don't know, ten percent right like and bomber and annaBella like, you know ninety percent who's gonna win.

right, right?

Or who maybe not who's gna win, but who's going to? Who's got there back against the wall and has the most at stake to make sure that they give up their best shot.

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Alright, what would have happened?

Otherwise, well, he is hard to say this actually is a really interesting one. Um had these companies, let's take rightly, for instance, had that been an independent company watched publicly and let's say they built google acx, what would that look like?

Yeah it's interesting in thinking about the incentive like then what we have had a true low end disruption event where you know you have a true new productivity company going after all, dinosaur or is where they still fighting an an important battle?

Well, and let's look at let's look at box and drop box here because these .

the closest comes would distorted .

in or you know i'm in the storage that the box and drops obviously did you know today? Ah who knows what will happen in the future but I think with both .

of those companies .

um drab x well there there's history .

there was a different person making that decision. Now yes.

we're referring to, as Steve jobs famously offered to by dropbox for a billion dollars I believe something .

around that .

a then first to .

call that a feature, not a, not a company. And then when he came back with this tale legs, then drew houton told him that politely declined.

But again, who knows what future holds? But sitting here, march twenty sixteen, do we think box or drop box could ever be a company at the scale of microsoft or google or amazon? Personally.

I think that's hard to see. Yeah yeah ah mon, if if if IT does go that direction, you know it's it's box going to microsoft row drop box planetary in .

some new they .

they need consumers to pay, which is a really hard thing to do for utility file storage. They like that.

But if a mythical, rightly, or upstart still existed, would that be more of a contender than a storage focus company?

Yeah I mean, I mean, perhaps what happens is dropbox buys observable and then you have a true the microsoft equivalent of one drive and word online and is not clearly .

dropbox has no had these thoughts as well. And they bought mail box, got several other company .

that is a company that's not good at acquisitions.

Future episode here.

all of drop boxes, bodies bury that mean.

yeah, yeah, yeah, alright. Already did my technium when you want to talk about you.

I I write down that I wanted draw the parallel classic low and disruptions. So I think I think we've been that one pretty good.

Should we do conclusion? Yeah, yeah.

Now we got one more selection that we're adding on. Yes.

get to that minute. You stay tuned.

Yeah so. We gave youtube I gave youtube the sea um and that's that's become a money pit for google at least um I think it's relatively breaking even business. But god, is that thing expensive to run this? Not terribly expensive to run, not terribly expensive to buy um probably expensive from a man power perspective. Like applied takes a lot of lot of engineers to to keep us in going and develop IT.

But but given I mean google does make money yeah.

So I think I think the business unit of of google apps for businesses is self sustaining. You know. I'm anna. Also give IT A C, but more because I think IT is a distraction for google and less because I think it's it's not expensive in terms of dollars. I think it's expensive in terms of opportunity, cost of attention.

Yeah, interesting. So you're making an argument, not this specific argument, but so category argument, that by acquiring these companies and taking a productivity focus strategy for several years, adopting that a google IT was actually a major distraction from either their core strategy, uh, with the search or or finding another sort of leg of the store that would be a Better fit with their core capabilities as a company versus trying to go down a path that um they really weren't equip to succeed.

yeah. I mean, I think at the end of the day, google was looking for a second huge business, much like for microsoft, add windows and then they had office. And there is some .

argument .

that IT contributes to their existing business, but they were going after selling productivity tools and that just didn't become a huge business for them. I mean, it's it's a decent business. I think it's a self sustaining business, is a profitable business, but it's not a google scale business.

It's not a huge business.

right? And and I think for many years, that was where they were focusing energy when really you know there's there's A A big potential problem with with their their current business as things go more mobile. And now they're looking at all these other moon and opportunities. And I think for a long time, they thought productivity can .

be a second huge business for them. yeah. So I was gonna give this acquisition and b for many the reasons you initially started talking about.

Well, wasa huge, successful. They didn't spend on money and IT does IT. It's not losing a lot of money for them or consuming a lot of capital like youtube.

But I think i'm convinced by your argument because for technology companies where you Operate in this battle field every day, where there's this huge fog bar and it's very uncertainty is a way of life. There are of one resource that you have that most important for startups and big companies are lake, even apple and google and microsoft and amazon is your focus. And this was a pretty major delusion of focus for google for a long time, obviously been very, very successful, and things like search and android and many others.

But that resource is very precise. And for both of us, working with start up, see to this is what we coach founders all the time. You focus, focus, focus. This is the most important thing, is all that you have as a start up. Um I think i'm convinced I will be minus still more .

generous than me, alright. So we have a new section and this is a section where we talk about things that are a media or H A movie or A T V show or something we're reading, or a book or a new publication of where we find fascinating and in in true lingo, we're calling this the car of out. So I will start with my car without from this week and actually we'll call since the last episode. Bill sims launched the ringer and for those of you who are not not subscribed to to the ringer, it's totally sports focused.

But it's really the the um kind of crown duel of the bills human's media empire, I think after after grand land after his for those who you don't know ill bill ams parted with the S P N to launch grand land, which was incredible long form content about sports and I was like the most incredibly well written prose about sports you could ever read that would take you on this journey and make comparisons to pop culture. And an event that happened fifty years ago and truly reliable and billions is is a gift as a writer and we saw to launch a podcast and finally the ringer which is the um the thing that has it's starting as an an email these letter in a website. But um it's a very small staff and it's a kind of a new media publication that um that bills ams has launched after the tumulus shut down of uh of grand land by by E S P N as as you know I is probably made senses of very expensive property.

But i'm a really quote from the the first team email that went out, bill bill introducing the ringer and he does this great little section. We talks about all the names that IT could have been and this this is just one of the reasons why he's a great rider to read, but he's starting about several. The names in the paragraph ends with oppor reson sounds like a hedge fund.

Foreign storm sounds like a horse that would be favor to win the kentucky darby side two two insider grand world to ludar. Is F R E S P N too easy too? And I would just really rarely ever get to start up talking about like their ridiculous naming meeting. The first email includes the classic photograph of the of the White pore with all the potential names crossed out. Is just like some of the most relative writing, even if you're not a sports person, is just incredibly entertaining.

I love IT I love IT my what I should say to the part of the inspiration for the car about um was um my wife Jenny introduced me to a two of slates podcast the political gap fest and the culture gap fest both of which are excEllent and and they both do a segment like this so shout out to slate and thank you to them um so my car ball for the week is uh is something that I think uh will IT picks up on a lot of themes from our show going back to our very first episode.

And I just finally finished a crossed off my reading less creativity ink, uh which is the fixed our book by a cat mall IT is fantastic, one of the best books i've read um certainly this year but in in the past few years best non infection books um and and ordinarily i'm pretty i'm pretty tough on sort of business books and they can often be treat and repetitive. This was none of those things and I think listeners, if you enjoy our show, you will love this book and and the one thing I would say from IT there there are so many good stories from you Steve jobs stories to all the picks are history um but a an and general management lessons and start up lessons. But uh my favorite part of IT uh is talking about uh the creative process and and managing the creative process which obviously picks are is so good bad um and the the the one of the points that that makes in in in the book is that this is always a struggle。 Even the pigs are they've done this so many times um and there's this temptation for them, even within the company to to make IT easier, to make IT winton repeat know why do they have to struggle every time but if you don't have that struggle, no, you don't get something great um and I think that is so applicable to start up like I see IT with the companies that I work with you know every day they're good times and bad times but even the companies were to the outside world that looks like it's all use my least favourite race of up into the right because it's always to the right but he looks like it's all up as IT goes to the right you know inside like it's up and down every single day um and there are periods of just huge existential chAllenges and and one of the book talks about lic every pixar film uh and every disney film. H since since the I position is just, you know if you don't have this crisis, it's very hard to make something great .

and that we want to .

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Yeah, fanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time. Here acquired jeff bases his idea that the company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste Better. I E spend your time and resources only on what's actually gone to move the needle for your product and your customers and outsource everything else that doesn't. Every company needs compliance and trust with their vendors and customers. IT plays a major role enabling revenue because customers and partners demand IT, but yet IT add zero flavor to your actual product that IT .

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will leave me here. Thanks for tuning in this week. Visit us on itunes, a review you like the show, tell your friends and see next time you.

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