Google's founders thought about money early but built the cash register after nailing user experience. Solve real problems, keep users happy, then monetization follows naturally. Don't reverse the order.
Think money last and user first. When you build an organization, when you build a company, many, many founders are very preoccupied, especially outside of Silicon Valley, of making money. And now, this doesn't read, don't think about money. It says, think money last. Most companies, the way we built them, and venture-backed organizations, venture-backed companies, if you solve a real problem, if you satisfy your users, if you do the right things, they will come back. Because in today's internet, in today's economy, in today's next mobile app is just one click away, or deleting the app is is just a 2-second hold on the app, you will lose a user very, very quickly if you don't do the right things. But what you can be sure is that if you do the right things, you will make money with that user in very, very different ways that you can possibly imagine. One very, very common misperception was that Google was built under the premise of, oh, we're never going to make money. We don't have to make money. We built this cool technology, and we'll figure the rest out. It's absolutely not true. As a matter of fact, Larry— Sergey, in 1999, when everybody was losing money, he was joking and said, oh, I try to be different from the other guys. He couldn't get dates, so he wanted to be different. He had to have a unique angle. And he would analyze what everyone says and how he can be different to differentiate himself. And one way to come up with this is not a money-losing director of a company, but a director of a money-making company. So in the DNA of Google, we actually had the idea of making money built in very, very early on. We used to say that, you know, build the cash register early. Think about how you will be making money on day one. Doesn't mean that you have to make money. Doesn't mean that you should build your products around making money. You always build the products and the company around serving a user, making somebody happy, and retaining that user or customer. But you will make money with that afterwards.
