Hunting for the Right Cause

So when I got to Google, Larry and Sergei had created this organization called Google.org. They tried to do something new. Instead of making a 501(c)(3), a regular foundation that used tax advantage money, instead, they made a pledge to shareholders that they would put 1% of Google’s equity, 1% of Google's profits, and a large percentage of Google's talented engineering and other staff to work for things that wouldn't benefit shareholders or benefit the world. And that became Google.org. When I came there about two and a half years ago, the real question was, "How do you choose from all the awful things in the world, the thing that we could do uniquely," or said in another way, "How do you take the engineering and the skills, not the money, but the idea of Google, and use those resources for making the world a little bit better, a little bit fairer, a little bit more just, a little bit safer?" I think I had only been at Google for about a month when I had received almost 10,000 letters, emails, packages at my doorstep, phone calls from people who had very good ideas on how that money could be used. These were good people. They were very noble people with great projects. Sorting through them was the hardest task that we had. It took us a year and a half, which seems like an awful long time. It took us a year and a half to take those 10,000 good ideas and come up with five that we thought we could add unique benefit to. In doing it, we first started off by saying, "What's the single most important criteria?" There's a lot of criteria. One of them is, "Can Google add anything different than the Red Cross or another organization?" Another criteria is, "Is it big enough?" Is the idea big enough? Will it scale? Will what you're doing scale? Another is, "Is it sustainable?" Just like questions you'd ask if you're looking at a business plan. But I started off with something called Gandhi's Talisman. This is an answer that Gandhi gave when he was leading the...

Channel: Stanford ECorner Video Length: 3m 20s Date Found: Thu, Nov 05 2009 6:17 PM Category: Business Date Produced: Wed, May 14 2008 12:00 AM View Count: 0