Google's 80-20 Rule

Filed in archive E-Commerce on September 27, 2005

I'm sitting down to write this article with a number of unrelated threads running through my brain. One of them is about a good friend of mine telling me that I should start my articles with the phase "In the Year of Our Lord..." to gain credibility with my audience from the start. I thought that was pretty funny. The reason I begin with that thought is because I've had a couple people tell me that a couple articles I've written don't really inspire them sufficiently. In my articles Opportunities Abound and Providing Content for Mobile Devices I talked about that ability to provide content for a marketplace. That content probably would not allow the creator to quit his or her day job, but it would potentially start someone on down the road to doing so.

This leads me to a professor I met in graduate school named Jeff Shuman. Jeff was a very inspirational person and my semester in his entrepreneurship class is one I will never forget. He forced us to go out and talk with real people about our ideas. Sometimes that was a very painful process and other times it was very exhilarating. The act of getting in front of potential customers helped us understand the idea of the entrepreneurial pushcart.

With the pushcart an entrepreneur doesn't need much to get going and one thing that I know about myself is that I'm cheap. This has lead me to work with open source products and communities whenever I work on something on my own. This concept also draws me to things like the StrikeIron marketplace and Nokia's Preminet Solution marketplace. The reason I'm drawn to these marketplaces is because it takes very little to get involved. I don't think that providing content to either of them alone will pay all of my bills. What it will do for me is to help me figure out what works and what doesn't. If there is one thing that Jeff Shuman did, and all the successful entrepreneurs he introduced us to, was to show us that success is a process.

I find an example of this process in Google. They allow their engineers to spend 20% of the time on personal projects. It is probably hard for some people to accept the fact that letting engineers spend 20% of their time on personal project is worthwhile to the business. However, one of the products a Google engineer came up with was Google Adwords. That one product is now a huge revenue driver for Google and a big part of their growth.

I wonder what percent of readers of this article allow themselves to spend 20% of their time on personal projects. Providing content to a marketplace may seem small at first but it is something to build on. An entrepreneur needs to start somewhere.