Is Xobni the next Google?

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A Dribble, then a River

Today seems to be the day of Google-bashing. Bob Cringley writes:

"Google is an amazing entrepreneurial petri dish. Yet at the same time, it is doomed to disappoint nearly every entrepreneurial type who works there. This is key: Google is sowing the seeds of its own eventual destruction. It can't help doing so.

[...]

With hundreds -- and soon thousands -- of Google employees vested and solvent, we'll shortly see a dribble, then a river, then a flood of former Google employees with time, money, and experience, and some of them will have the drive to realize the dreams of those thousands of ideas that were rejected by their former company."

Xobni is hiring.

A Healthy Disregard for the Impossible

Two weeks ago, I quit my job at Google. Later this year, I will join Xobni ("inbox backwards") in San Francisco, California!

Why leave Google? It's a fantastic company: They have the smartest people, enlightened management, great projects and pamper employees to no end. But most importantly, they're one of the few companies that stick to their values: When they say "don’t be evil", they actually mean it. I can only recommend working there.

But what I really wanted to do after school is to do a startup.

When I visited Adam and Matt in August last year, I was impressed: They were also interested in email, they seemed wicked smart, and had all the right connections. But above all, they had a healthy disregard for the impossible. These guys are willing to do what it takes to succeed.

Back then, it was hard to lure me away from my Google offer, and they didn't succeed. Since then, the company, software, and goal have evolved and they've recently received significant VC funding (as the media found out today).

Matt and Adam don't take no for an answer. After another offer earlier this year, it took me quite a while to make up my mind and actually quit. Back at Google Zurich, I was working on an awesome project with great people. The office was growing fast. Google had just won another award for being the best place to work, ever. It didn’t seem like a smart, mainstream move at the time.

What pulled the trigger was reading Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work on a plane ride back from the States. If all of these guys had done it, so could I. Around the same time, I got an email from Paul Buchheit who wrote: "The great thing about a good startup is that even if it doesn't work out, you still end up learning a lot more and meeting more interesting people than you otherwise would." That's true: The learning curve will be much steeper at Xobni than at Google; my impact will be much larger. That's the kind of environment I enjoy.

As one of Xobni's earliest employees, I'll be heading up their engineering effort. We're looking for a few superstars. If you're one of them, let me know.

Mountain View

I'm in California for work stuff. Life is great.

Whenever I get to the US, there's always this jolt of enthusiasm just as I arrive. The land of the free, the home of the brave? Oh well. But everything does feel so much larger, the weather is great, people seem more open. I met with a couple of friends who are doing a startup and they radiate energy and optimism. People seem young and fresh and adorable.

I also found that I love being infantilized. SpaceShipOne models? Dinosaurs? Bathing in colored plastic balls? Great food that will keep me from learning how to cook? Oh, get it ON.

In America, the consumer rules. There's apparently a TV ad in Switzerland where Migros, one of the local supermarket chains, shows off their wide selection of cheeses or some other thing. That's great, I think, but some of their smaller stores would snugly fit into the cereal section of a Safeway.

I wonder how long this jolt of enthusiasm will continue. After a few days, it's usually the tiny things that start annoying me: The fact that prices don't include sales tax or the weirdness of houses that are built of wood, not brick and concrete. And the huge distances. Mountain View really is too far from "the city". I'll let you know if the enthusiasm degrades.

A Month of Google Zurich

I re-joined Google a little more than a month ago. My friends have been asking me how it is. Obviously, I can't say about what I actually work on, can't talk about the Endoxon deal and also won't be able to disclose the Master Plan. But I can say a couple of things.

Above all, I love the team I work with. There's my friend Douwe, best known for inventing Google Trends. He has about two multi-billion-dollar ideas per week. We should hire an intern just to follow him around and write up all the stuff he comes up with. My manager, Oliver, won the best-PhD-thesis-award in Germany before he joined. Jonas, my super-friendly co-worker, has churned out a cool demo of what we're building. Then there's our charming Austrian product manager Chris, whom we should really get to work less. Our intern Alex should also get an award for his achievements: He produces tons of code, but is hauntingly quiet. When he does point out something, it's usually some tiny detail we forgot about but would have cost us days of debugging later on. Last week, he returned to his native Eastern Europe to get his degree, but our recruiters 'convinced' him to return afterwards.

When US companies put engineering offices in Europe, it's usually the dull work that they're concerned with: Localize this, translate that. Google's EMEA Engineering HQ in Zurich is different. I'm happy to report that we work on really crazy, brave, and fun things. You don't need to be in Silicon Valley to do that.

The most popular pastime at the office is foosball: I really need to get some mad skillz.