Googleplex

Google's infrastructure was built specifically to bypass the ego and mitigate these cognitive biases.

Google is famous for treating employees well, right? The free sushi, the massive parental leave, the entire Googleplex environment.

Yeah, but those aren't just perks.

They are investments in psychological safety.

Yeah.

Reminds me of my conversation with Gisselle Navarro of HouseFresh, who got gobsmacked by HCU, got invite, invited to the, the Googleplex to talk about how they could improve it.

And, you know, uh, y- she lost all of that Google organic traffic, so she turned and started to build a community, um, on Reddit.

And, you know, that turned-- Uh, and on YouTube.

We start out this episode with Kent Brockman.

He is standing outside the Springfield Googleplex.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure this is the Googleplex, right? Or is this the Aztec? I think it's the Aztec.

Oh, it is the Aztec.

Okay.

I'm so used to them not going to the Aztec anymore.

I know, right? They've always been going to the Googleplex.

And so he takes a smoke of a cigarette.

They've done four of them.

And then there were, maybe they're wondering, or someone inside of Google HQ is like, why isn't this working well? It's like, yeah, you've done four of the 12 steps needed to get this thing to really work well.

No surprise it's not doing well.

Yes, you have Google, you're Google, you have distribution, you have all these clicks going into it.

I don't know.

That's a tricky question, man.

Again, if I'm inside Google HQ right now or Airbnb HQ right now, it doesn't make sense for us to get on the same page with this layer, like the agent layer, versus before we were like, no, we're not in Google vacation rentals.

Would it make sense for them to be like, yeah, we're going to give you like an API that you can hit and then you can turn back results and then they click and they book on Airbnb, but we'll give you like that flow of information.

They have too much to get done and not enough talent on their team to do it today.

And so when they put out a job description, they are really putting out a cry for help from inside the Googleplex saying, "Hey, I need awesome data analysts so I can get my job done, so I can be successful in the world." But if you just blast them with 1,000 generic applications, that doesn't give them any signals of the fact that you're committed, dedicated, invested, all the things that we would be hungry for as the hiring manager.

It just says, "Hey, you're wasting my time, and now I'm on to the next." On the other hand, just to give you the sort of comparison, imagine that you did a little research, you understood who this person was, what their challenges were.

And again, you can use AI for this.

I attend showcases.

At one point, I tour a PBL school with state-of-the-art tech and a physical environment that would rival the newly opened Googleplex.

I sketch out sprawling notes as I move from session to session, including one where the presenter lays out a clear process for PBL.

This is the gold standard approach, I'm told.

And that was our first, say, connection with Google.

And then from there, we were invited to go and travel to the Googleplex or whatever it's called, the HQ.

And then we spent the full day with 20 or 19 other websites from different sectors of the web and a bunch of engineers and just talking about what, what we could do or what could they do really? How could their systems be improved so that sites like ours weren't getting destroyed? And they, you know, I think after that, they just said, it's going to take a long time.

It's never going to come back to where it was.

his background is actually an operator and a venture capitalist.

He also worked at Google AdSense out of Googleplex.

So he's got ties to California for sure.

And he really came at this as an investor, not from finance.

So if you're not Google, what are you stuck with? Which brings us to the Talon University thesis by Marcus Bindevold.

Because this is what happens when you step out of the pristine Googleplex and into the muddy trenches of everyday IT.

It really is a fantastic reality check.

Ben Duvald set out to test the current market of off-the-shelf AI web application pen testing tools.