The Digital Movement

Infocomm LIVE!, a platform that aims to encourage the younger crowd to get into the technology arena, as well as take on entrepreneurship. “Come Meet Google’s Jolly Good Fellow”, an event organized by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and The Digital Movement (TDM), is thus the first of many such Infocomm Live! speaker series to come.

Mr Tan Chade Meng, the jolly good fellow of Google and Singapore’s first googler, shared his personal philosophy, experiences as well as anecdotes on working with the multi-billion dollar company. He began with Google’s history, culture and mission - to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful; before sharing with us what life is like at Google. From food and trips, the 100 feet rule, 70-20-10 rule, 20% time rule to fun stuff, Chade Meng did not fail to inspire and draw laughter from the crowd.

There is certainly much for us to learn from Chade Meng and his aspirations, especially with regards to his positive belief in every individual. One of the key take away messages from the 107th employee of Google for Singaporeans was that anyone can change the world. There are many ways to realise our full potential and it’s important to strive to serve the greater good. In addition, to him, failure is not an end in itself but the key to innovation.

In retrospect, the event was a success with about 200 attendees who turned up at DXO that night,
and were treated to food and free flow of non-alcoholic drinks at the bar. We now look forward to
the next Infocomm Live! Series!

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Live blog:-

Good evening! Thank you for dropping by as we are preparing to meet the jolly good fellow of Google - Chade-Meng, who is also the first Singapore to be employed by Google. This evening’s event is organised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and The Digital Movement (TDM). Meng will be sharing his personal philosophy, experiences as well as anecdotes on working with multi-billion dollar company Google.

If you are somewhere in town and you happen to stumble upon this, do join us at DXO, Colours by the Bay, 8 Raffles Avenue, #01-13, Esplanade Mall. I’m sure we would be able to make some space for you.=)

If you are already at DXO, you would be pleased to know that non-alcoholic drinks are on the house today, kindly sponsored by IDA. Nice little glow sticks are also available at the registration counter if you have not gotten yours.

The preparation started really early, and I was welcomed by lots of “mic tests” which thankfully stopped before the first guests came in. You can tell that this is not a particularly “techie” event by looking at the crowd - which comprises of the young, old, serious-looking and those seemingly waiting for the party to start. Yes, a helluva time is what you are going to get today as Meng shares with us his experience at Google; and if you don’t know by now, his official post in Google… is “Jolly Good Fellow”. Cool company, isn’t it?

6:57pm: I managed to find a hidden corner to do this live blogging. It’s probably the only corner where there is a power point for me to plug my laptop in. Well, we certainly don’t want the live blogging to suddenly go… er… dead, do we? =) Today, it’s our honour to have Rear-Admiral (NS) Ronnie Tay, CEO  of IDA to grace the event. This is the first of many Infocomm LIVE! Speaker Series to come and we will have Meng share with us on living and innovating at Google. This event is brought to you by IDA in partnership with The Digital Movement (TDM).

7:05pm: While we are waiting for the event to start, let’s have some small talk on getting into Google. Now, I am definitely no jolly good fellow, but I am lucky enough to know, personally, someone who went through the entire interview and is now a fellow jolly good fellow at Google. He apparently applied for a job and was shortlisted. After some short telephone interview (I can’t remember about this bit), he was flown down to Google HQ where he was almost served like the prince. The food, I heard, is wonderful and tastes authentic. In fact, it was something he really seemed to enjoy. To cut a long story short, he was finally employed by Google and have to move to California (speaking of which, my friend does seem to resemble Meng a little). Apparently, the lifestyle in there is so great, that they can just take time off to get their own stuffs done or to just take the dog out for a walk.

For such flexibility given by Google, it’s little wonder that the employees - or jolly good fellows, would work equally hard for the company. Now, let us all try to think of some companies in Singapore that adopts the same culture… =)

7:35pm: The event has started. The emcee of the evening is Estee Teo who started the event off with cheers from the crowd. Reiterating her, food is served at the back and non-alcoholic drinks are free-flow for the night. Today, we are also going to welcome 2 guests today - Rear Admiral (NS) Ronnie Tay - CEO of IDA, and Mr Chade-Meng, who is the first Singaporean employed by Google.

The crowd is just beginning to warm up as we welcome on stage, Rear Admiral (NS) Ronnie Tay.

7:38pm: RA (NS) Ronnie takes the mic and thinks that he is a little out of place with most of the crowd coming in casual shirts and jeans. Come on, we all know that it’s not true. Unknown to me, there is apparently only enough space for 200 guests to register for this event and according to RA (NS) Ronnie Tay, invitations for this event is sent out in the most usual way - not just via email, but through online portals.

Today, we have Chade-Meng to join us on the 1st of the LIVE! Speaker Series by IDA. He’s the 107th employee, to be exact, of Google. At this moment, he is working on a lecture series - Seach inside yourself, which is just a little of what he is doing. He is here today with his wife and child and it’s definitely our pleasure to have him with us. Agreeing with RA (NS) Ronnie, it’s going to be an interesting night with Chade-Meng as he hands the mic over to him.

7:45pm: Seated on the cushion, Meng introduces himself. He is an early Google employee and is the first Singapore Googler. He is hired as an engineer and now working with Google University. He worked on Mobile search, search quality, chinese search and all. HE developed emotional intelligence training program in Google. He is also the ambassador for Google.org - which is the official philantrophic part of Google. He graduated from NTU and worked in NUS. He considers himself bi-partisan. He also wants to save the world when he grows up. Go ahead - ask him about that and he will give you the entire flow.

He has a photo of Lao Zi on the screen and he thinks Lao Zi is a very rich fellow because people keep saying “Lao Zi You Qian” (^_^)”‘

Meng has a wall of pictures whom he boasts of - that, yes, he builds great walls. He has met many famous people - Colin Powell, Robin Williams, Condoleezza Rice - just to name a few. He’s also met President Nathan, President Mikhail and President Bill Clinton - yes - they decorate his wall!

Meng’s New Job is in Google University’s School of Personal Growth - to bring ou the best in Google and Googlers, which he will talk about later.

Today’s agenda started with Google History and Culture - which is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This is the mission statement since Day 1 - and it does not mention anything about creating a search engine - which is really huge. However, this is not just a mission statement, but rather, the way they run the business. Google is started by Sergey Brin and Larry Page and the CEO is Eric Schmidt. Google is started in Stanford University in 1995 and started off as a project for backlane analysis. If you look at any web page, it’s easy to tell which pages a page links to but it’s not easy to know which pages link to it. This gave rise to the crawling idea. Like all great companies in the Valley, Google was started from a garage - Google - World Headquarters.

Meng now gives a story of the company. Google is worth 150 billion dollars today while it could be bought for 1 million dollars. The first cheque was actually addressed to Google Inc. - but there was not Google Inc. then, and hence, the company was formed. The front page of Google is the same as when it started, except that the “!” is now missing from the word. Subsequently, they had Google Doodles - where they broke the golden rule of not touching the company logo. Subsequently, they start having April Fool’s joke, where the first joke was on PigeonRank (do a google on this).

So, how is life in Google? Life is fun! They play frosball, hockey, food (see! I told you!) and massage. In Google, meals are served 3 times a day and all are organic. Their beef and tuna are good stuff and the least meal of the day is sushi. (!!!!). There is a 100 feet rule in Google where nobody in Google should be more than 100 feet away from good. However, they didn’t tell you which direction the 100 feet is towards. =P

Dogs are allowed in the office but cats are not (ohhh……) and once a year, the entire company goes for a ski trip, except for 2008 when they went to Disney Land because the number of employees “out numbers” the mountain.

So, how do you create a 150 million dollar company? The first is to know about the 20% time rule - where Google allows Googlers to spent up to 20% of their time to do anything they want. From here, some good products came out of it - one of which is Google News. The others were Google Scholar, orkut and basically much of Google labs. Gmail was also created out of this - product of Paul. The other rule is the 70-20-10 rule, where 70% of the money/time goes to things that are core of Google, 20% goes to anything related, e.g. Blogger, and the 10% goes to anything in the world.

The structure in Google is extremely flat - where it only takes… er… 2 promotions to be the founder. =)

8:16pm: Meng has a burning question - can someone turn up the aircon? Anyway, what is “promoting innovation”? It is pretty much like growing flowers - and while we can’t force flowers to grow, we can create the conditions for the flower to grow. Of course, the next question is on how we actually create the condition? Well, we can create the climate - and Google does that by working on small projects and hire people that are really, really smart. Everyone at Google are able to access information such as the amount Google earns, amongst others, and every Googler believes that they can change the world. They also let engineers find their passion by working on things they want.

In Google, failure is the key to innovation. Soichiro Honda “Success is 99% failure”, and Thomas Watson are just amongst the few who tasted failure. The other key, is to feel stupid. Apparently, you have to be confused, upset and think you are stupid.

8:23pm: Fun stuffs - of course there are fun stuffs. Firstly, Google has one of the best translator and they get to see many funny translations from other online translators. If they analyse search data, they can see interesting patterns - “full moon”, “earthquakes” and they also found out that there are 800 ways to spell “Britney Spears”. Heh. Apparently, there’s also a book flipper machine when they embarked on a project to make every book searchable! Incredible!

Lastly, there’s a quote from Larry Page “The ultimate search engine would… ” (oops! I didn’t catch that). Oh well…

If there is one thing that Meng wants us to bring back today - it’s that anyone can change the world.  There are many ways to realise our full potential and it’s important to strive to serve the greater good. With this, Meng (Chade-Meng Tan, meng@google.com) ends the session and starts the Q&A session.

8:30pm: Q&A session starts. Ground rules for the night is to identify yourself and to stick to learning questions. First question by Ishel, he applied to Google, went through 4 rounds and got rejected… Anyway, he is asking about some power-app that is started by ex-Googlers. To this, Meng thinks that Google concentrates more on the users rather than competitors because this naturally brings in the moola.

The next question comes on the issue of retention - to this, Meng, thinks that the easiest way is actually to make things fun for the employees. Next, Andy from the floor asks about the flat organization and how it is managed. The answer is that Google is “on the brink of chaos” and the people there are very motivated - so things get done anyway even though they are not “managed”.

Next, the moderator asked on how it is decided that a product from the “20%” becomes a product. Ideas become products when it gets the thumbs up from the management and get killed based on statistics on usage. Next up, we have Bernie who asked how culture was built when it was started up. Meng’s observation is that a start-up is built on the vision of the founders; and to nurture by example. So even when an idea may be revenue generating, but if it does not benefit anyone, the product will not get the go-ahead.

Following up, someone asked Meng how he made the switch - to this, Meng said that he wanted to widen his horizon. When he reached the west, he felt that it was “Ru Yu De Shui” - like fish in water, and that he felt that when he was in the West, he thought that he founded a place to grow. Next question from Jeff, he wanted to know what stops Google from turning evil. To this, it started from a list of things that HR noted down which could simply be summed up as “Not be evil” by a fellow Googler. Next, Jeff also wanted to know if we should all be afraid of Google; to this, the answer was an obvious no. Simply because Google will work for the betterment of man else it will be dumped like dirt (of course, that’s in my own words).

So, what are some of the things that someone should do if he or she wants to change the world. To this, Meng thinks that the person should talk a lot about it - preferably to people who will believe in it - and to get the idea to grow with people and to get it to serve the greater good.

Someone next asked what the biggest problem for Google is. The answer? Scale. Google apparently has some problems with scale as they grow and even though they give people the 20% time, it is not known if this works until few years later. John from the audience next asked about the principle of censorship and what Google is doing about China’s policies on censorship. To this, Google will notify the user that some results are being censored while complying with China’s laws.

8:55pm: The next question from the audience is essentially on how they keep their engineers passionate - and the simple answer is to get them to believe that what they do can really change the world. Following up, someone asked about how a flat organization is being managed and not punishing failure. To this, objectives should be set up around methods as opposed to results - so when something is done, that the objective is met.

Next, someone asked how decisions are being made if there are conflicts - to which Meng answers that it’s through consensus.

Following, a lady asked what’s the most significant thing that happened in Google that changed Meng’s perspective. To this, Meng has a story to tell - the story of “Amid”. He decided one day that he wanted the CEO’s office and Eric had a tiny office. To this, Eric offered his office space to Amid as he was being nice. Amid was told to ask Wayne - the VP, to whom Wayne had no issues with it. Of course, Eric was being nice but well, his niceness backfired. Essentially, Eric went out of his office everytime there’s an important phone call. This tells a lot on Google’s culture… and insubordination. Heh.

9:05pm: Marcus from the floor asked about Meng’s vision to change the world. To this, Meng feels that he wants to make mental/emotional training (meditation) a field of science - to make it useful. If this is successful, this essentially brings about World Peace! This is because mental and emotional development brings about happiness, inner peace and compassion. A critical mass of happy, peaceful and compassionate people creates condition for world peace. This is a new approach to world peace - cultivating world peace from inside out, rather than imposing peace from outside in.

Someone then asked how does what Meng does make World Peace. Moment-to-moment, no-judging awareness is the answer, which is about bringing on self-awareness. Basically on emotional intelligence, which is… beyond what this poor live blogger can understand (oops!). However, what’s heart warming is that Meng remains passionate on bringing about World Peace.

9:10pm: Now, we would like to invite RA (NS) Ronnie to present Meng a token of appreciation, as well as Howie from TDM to present him… Ah Meng, as a token of appreciation from TDM. The event is now closed, but do feel free to mingle around. Have a good evening!