also referred to as: alphabet · google+
includes Google Search, Google Ads, Google Maps, Google Chrome, Google Labs, Google Ventures, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Google Hangouts, Google Gemini, Google Cloud, Google Glass and 45 more
195 statements across 89 episodes · 48 bullish · 48 bearish · 84 people on the record · first statement Jul 24, 2022 by Ken Norton · said 1,431 times in 202 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Lenny Rachitsky (402), Ethan Smith (77), Timothy Davis (40), Paul Adams (36), Bret Taylor (33), Jag Duggal (32), Shishir Mehrotra (29), Mayur Kamat (29)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 58 mentions in 13 episodes 4 per episode
- “I like being scared”: Molly Graham’s frameworks for rapid career growth | Molly Graham
- Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)
- The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)
- How to be a CEO when AI breaks all the old playbooks | Sequoia CEO Coach Brian Halligan
- How a Meta PM ships products without ever writing code | Zevi Arnovitz
- Why most AI products fail: Lessons from 50+ AI deployments at OpenAI, Google & Amazon
- How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook
- The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job)
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 377 mentions in 49 episodes 8 per episode
- The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
- He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor (Sierra)
- Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26)
- Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada
- Why ChatGPT will be the next big growth channel (and how to capitalize on it) | Brian Balfour
- Rapidly test and validate any startup idea with the 2-day Foundation Sprint
- The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots & why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li
- From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products
- 41 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 302 mentions in 39 episodes 8 per episode
- The ultimate guide to paid growth | Timothy Davis (Shopify)
- Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs)
- Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google)
- Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua
- Identify your bullseye customer in one day | Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at GV)
- Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and embracing AI | Cameron Adams
- Thinking like a gardener, slime mold, the adjacent possible: Product advice from Alex Komoroske
- Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll
- 31 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 469 mentions in 68 episodes 7 per episode
- What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom)
- Becoming evidence-guided | Itamar Gilad (Gmail, YouTube, Microsoft)
- Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital)
- Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
- Failure
- Leveraging growth advisors, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta)
- The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)
- What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda)
- 60 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 225 mentions in 33 episodes 7 per episode
- The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
- The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra, Coda, YouTube, Microsoft
- The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, First Round Capital)
- The art of product management | Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, Twitter, Google, Yahoo)
- How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google
- Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs)
- Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer)
- How to scrappily hire for, measure, and unlock growth | Crystal Widjaja, Gojek and Kumu
- 25 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
Everything said about Google, oldest first
Jul 24, 2022 neutral
Jul 24, 2022 negative
Norton: Direct career advice is like cotton candy and rarely solves problems
“Advice is not super, not as powerful as you might think it is. Like it's a little bit like cotton candy. Doesn't have a lot of nutrition and you get a nice sugar high. You feel great. Both sides feel happy, but then sort of a couple of weeks later, a couple of…”
Jul 24, 2022 bearish
Jul 31, 2022 positive
Widjaja: Why super apps dominate Southeast Asia instead of the US
“I think the sentimentality of a conglomerate is very different in Southeast Asia. So we've grown up with, you know, a specific conglomerate owning, not just the mall that you go to, but also the apartment building that you live in and the school that you go to…”
Aug 18, 2022
Jackson: Master brands should use descriptive names for new sub-products
“The only difference is if you have a lot of equity in your company name, like I'll, Square is a good example. Like Square had a lot of equity. Google is a perfect example. A lot of equity in the company name. You often don't want to name your products somethin…”
Aug 18, 2022 neutral
Aug 21, 2022
Aug 25, 2022
Doshi: Google Ads ignored opportunities under $100 million in revenue
“So I worked on the ads team at Google for a number of years, and there was this kind of unwritten kind of rule of thumb that, Hey, if it's not going to generate more than a hundred million dollars in revenue, it's not worth talking about it.”
Sep 1, 2022 neutral
Media mix modeling requires $100K+ monthly spend across 3+ channels
“I think it's useful if you're spending a considerable amount, what's considerable, I'd say north of a 100,000 a month on paid media. And if you have some level of channel complexity, so you're not just on Google Or on Facebook, but maybe you're on three plus y…”
Sep 11, 2022 negative
Kramer: Hiring Big Tech veterans as early startup marketers is a mistake
“I see this mistake all the time. Like you don't want to go out and hire someone super senior who's like only worked at a public company. Like that's the wrong person. And often VCs are, you know, sort of lead investors that aren't in a certain niche. Like they…”
Sep 15, 2022 bearish
Sep 15, 2022
Oct 2, 2022 neutral
Nov 3, 2022 negative
Ipsen: Hiring Big-Tech CPOs Is Often a Mistake for Early Startups
“I think especially for founders that haven't hired for this caliber of talent in the past, it's really easy to be distracted by shiny objects and look at huge names. You want to find the CPOs of Google and YouTube or what have you, because that seems like it w…”
Nov 17, 2022 bullish
Orosz: In 2016, candidates routinely rejected Google and Facebook for Uber
“When I went to Uber in 2016, it was one of the highest regarded places back in 2016 and 20 17. It was the other way around, but back in 2016, people were turning out Facebook and Google offers to go at Uber, which we all thought would change the world.”
Dec 1, 2022
Smith: In-body links carry far more SEO weight than footer and navigation links
“Footer links are not equal to body links. So links in the nav and in the footer are navigational links and they count, but they don't count as much. So Google will look at your page and separate out navigation, but body links count a lot.”
Dec 1, 2022
Smith: SERP overlap determines whether keywords should share a page
“You can basically put in five year plan template, five year plan examples, and you can look to see how much overlap of the results are there. So the, if the results are completely different for those two keywords, you should probably have two different pages, …”
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Dec 1, 2022
Smith: Google treats non-SEO traffic as a core authority signal
“Google doesn't want you to just be an SEO site and they want you to be a credible domain before they rank you. And if you're starting from zero, they don't have enough signals that you are. So the way that we assess that is I will go into the first signal I'll…”
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Smith: Google tracks post-click dwell time via Chrome and Android for ranking
“Google's tracking everyone through Chrome and Android, and they can actually see what happened after they left Google. And ultimately Google wants you to end your session or find the answer, find what you wanted on that page. So the more you click on, on our U…”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Smith: Higher user engagement increases Google search rankings immediately
“Your engagement will be higher and your entire engagement will cause you to rank higher and it'll cause you to rank higher right away. So it's not only a way to be robust against algorithm changes. It's a way to rank higher right now.”
Dec 1, 2022
Ethan Smith: Creating individual pages for every keyword variation no longer works
“You don't want a page for every single keyword. So when I started in SEO, you would have a category page for every single keyword. And so I was at a shopping site. We had ten million plus pages. So every single way that you could possibly search for a product …”
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Smith: Google builds semantic topic graphs dynamically, not via curated taxonomies
“I think people over, overestimate the amount of expert curated taxonomies that Google uses, and it's actually a lot of Algorithmic dynamics, definitions of a graph that are generated constantly. And again, they change.”
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Ethan Smith: Product pages cannot rank for comparative category queries
“And so an example would be a best cameras. So you'll have a category page and a listicle page typically. So you could have one or one or the other, but you will need one of those. If you have a product page, you're not gonna rank.”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Smith: Smaller sites can outrank high-authority competitors via focused topical authority
“And this is actually a great way where earlier companies can actually rank, even if their competitors have way more domain rank than they do. Because again, Google's saying for a fintech site, maybe you don't have as much authority as Investopedia, but you're …”
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Ethan Smith: Video transcripts fail to rank for instructional queries against articles
“So for masterclass, you type in how to poach an egg and you see that all the results are articles with a recipe. That's a very clear correlation that if I want to rank, I need a page like this. So with masterclass is an interesting example. They have classes a…”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Smith: MasterClass outranked Food Network by closing topic content gaps
“And part of why Masterclass early on was able to outrank Food Network, who has way more, who had way more authority in, in food is because other companies had these gaps. They were not looking at all 400 keywords and they didn't talk about health benefits and …”
Dec 1, 2022 negative
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 11, 2022
Dec 18, 2022 negative
Dec 29, 2022
Jan 5, 2023 neutral
Jan 5, 2023 positive
Jan 19, 2023 negative
Mehta: Short-term booking optimization undermined Tripadvisor's direct user retention
“The product teams were constantly optimizing for what's going to drive bookings in the moment. And so the thing that drives bookings from a visit to Google naturally moves a person down a transaction path and gets them to the booking and doesn't have them stop…”
Jan 29, 2023
Mar 5, 2023
Claire Hughes Johnson: Used the same operating system across disparate Google functions
“At Google, there was a point where I had like some product people, industrial design operations, like really BD, really different functions. Actually how I fundamentally ran them at the bare bones at the house architecture level was the same.”
Mar 16, 2023 neutral
Mar 19, 2023 positive
Miller: Web browsers are high-margin, cash-printing products with low marginal costs
“Browsers print cash. There is a reason why they're owned primarily by Google, Apple, Microsoft. They're incredibly high margin. They're incredibly lucrative, low marginal costs. The cost of revenue is incredibly low, et cetera.”
Mar 19, 2023 negative
Google treats Chrome extensions as a loss leader, says Josh Miller
“They view it as a loss leader. They built Chrome extensions just so they could, you know, have parity with Firefox. They don't want you making extensions because you have some immersive extension experience. That's not something that you can index in Google an…”
Mar 19, 2023 negative
Miller: Apple and Google disincentivize rich web apps to protect revenues
“Apple, they don't want you making web apps or applications for the web. They want you making them for the Mac and the iPhone so they can tax you when you do it through the app store. And also surprisingly, Google doesn't want you making stuff more native and i…”
May 4, 2023 positive
Singleton: Stripe engineering interviews permit Google and Stack Overflow searches
“The other thing that all these loops have in common is nothing is a trick question. Like we try to put people into an environment, which is as close to doing the actual work together as we possibly can. So I mean, for engineers, for instance, we've got several…”
May 7, 2023 neutral
May 7, 2023 neutral
Jun 15, 2023 positive
Luc Levesque: AI search is the biggest disruption since Google's inception
“I was summarizing the Google changes to some people and originally was thinking this is the biggest change in the last 10 years. And then when I reflected on the last 10 years, I thought this is actually the biggest change since the inception of Google, actual…”
Jun 15, 2023 bearish
Luc Levesque: AI search will decimate informational organic clicks within 24 months
“And I think the changes will be We'll probably start seeing things shift to paid. You have to pay for that free traffic. And the second one is there may just be a case where those keywords just don't get many clicks anymore. You might drop down to a very small…”
Jun 15, 2023 bullish
Jul 23, 2023 negative
Weiss: AI UI must match data quality rather than projecting false confidence
“The promise of the UI has to match the quality of that underlying data. Which is to say, and I think that's actually one of the failings of the various LMs right now is they all appear supremely confident, even when they're completely hallucinating.”
Jul 30, 2023 positive
Aug 10, 2023
Aug 20, 2023
Hearst: Apple was led by craftspeople, Google by corporate strategists
“It's much more of like design and engineering kind of led organizations. Craftspeople, I would say more so than strategy people. So that was one of the stark differences I saw in my transition from Apple to Google. There are a lot more like people from Coca-Co…”
Aug 27, 2023 negative
Berkowitz: Why Deel avoids targeting the acronym 'EOR' for SEO
“When you type EOR to Google, it doesn't give you employer of record. It gives you enhanced oil recovery because most of the people typing EOR to Google Is looking for that solution. Now, if my team blindly went in and said, we're going to rank for EOR, we're n…”
Aug 27, 2023 neutral
Sep 14, 2023
Sep 21, 2023 neutral
Sep 21, 2023
Gilad: Gmail's tabbed inbox was first tested via an HTML facade
“We used a lot of those in the tabbed inbox, by the way, one of the first early versions was actually, we showed the tabbed inbox working. To people, but it wasn't really Gmail. It was just a facade of HTML and behind the scenes. And according to the permission…”
Sep 21, 2023
Sep 21, 2023 negative
Gilad: Google+ Caused Google to Miss Mobile Social Opportunities Like WhatsApp
“In hindsight, not only did Google bet on the wrong thing, it missed much easier opportunities. So just not far from Google's headquarters, there was WhatsApp. Not very famous in the US, but they actually created massive impact. Hundreds of millions of people w…”
Oct 1, 2023 neutral
Oct 1, 2023 negative
Shackleton: Tech career ladders are overly complex and inconsistent
“Most companies have career ladders with, like, 10 or 15 levels, and, you know, as soon as they hit some scale, the levels, there's, like, levels between levels, and I feel like I looked at the one at Google and, you know, you kind of, like, needed a PhD to dec…”
Oct 22, 2023 negative
Dunford: Most legendary businesses did not create their categories
“Obviously creating a category is not the only way to create a legendary business because the vast majority of legendary businesses did not create the categories that they're in. So Google did not create search. Facebook did not create social network. Like, I m…”
Oct 26, 2023
Adams: A good market requires people to care deeply about the problem
“To have a good market, you need a lot of people with the same problem, and they need to care a lot about it. Again, back to the Google social stuff, we found a lot of people With the same problem. They didn't really care. They didn't really care. Like, you kno…”
Oct 26, 2023 negative
Adams: Google Buzz and Google+ were driven by fear, not user needs
“A lot of the motivation for those projects came from a place of fear. You know, it didn't come from a place of let's make a great product for people. Let's like really understand the things people struggle with when communicating with family and friends. Like …”
Oct 26, 2023 negative
Oct 26, 2023 negative
Adams: Google privacy debates blocked shipping on a year-long project
“I remember when I went, I remember at Google, privacy was like really top of mind to the point that it would like block decisions, like block product progress, just privacy, circular conversations. So many circular conversations and nothing ever got built or s…”
Oct 26, 2023 neutral
Adams: Google isolated the Google+ team in a separate restricted building
“Google had done a lot of things at the time that, that, that were the first for them. I don't know if they've done them since, but things like everyone worked in Google plus was sent to a different building, that building a different key card. If you didn't wo…”
Oct 26, 2023 positive
Oct 26, 2023 negative
Dec 10, 2023
Scott: Relationships don't scale across organizations, but workplace culture does
“No matter how talented you are, relationships don't scale. But she did do those things for her direct reports and the people who she worked most closely with, all, all of us. And when a leader treats their team, the people who they interact with on a day to da…”
Dec 13, 2023
Google segregated the Google+ team in a restricted, keycard-access-only building
“Google had done a lot of things at the time that, that, that were the first for them. I don't know if they've done them since, but things like everyone worked in Google plus was sent to a different building that building a different key card. If you didn't wor…”
Dec 13, 2023 negative
Google Buzz and Google+ were driven by competitive fear, says Paul Adams
“I think a lot of the motivation for those projects came from a place of fear. You know, it didn't come from a place of let's make a great product for people. Let's like really understand the things people struggle with when communicating with family and friend…”
Dec 13, 2023
Jan 11, 2024
Schillace: Writely originally ran on C# on three rented Windows servers
“We started off, in, in C Sharp, which is little known, in, you know, our own, there's, like, pre-cloud, so we, like, had three file servers that we rented that were Windows machines in a data center in Texas with a sysadmin in the Philippines running them. So …”
Jan 11, 2024
Schillace: Google Docs would have died without legal protections and Schmidt's support
“If I had just been, like, a random Google employee with this idea, and no legal protection, and the CEO wasn't, you know, a fan of the project, it would have died. Like, there's no way it would have made it through that, that negativity, and that pessimism”
Jan 11, 2024 negative
Schillace: Google executives wanted to kill Google Docs despite millions of users
“Like in the early days, like we had like, I don't know, a couple million users, five million users. And there were still executives at Google telling me that it was a stupid idea and that it should stop. And like, we shouldn't be doing it.”
Jan 11, 2024
Jan 11, 2024 neutral
Schillace: Google treated candidate controversy and single interview vetoes as positive signals
“I interviewed Dave Bezris. I interviewed him when he came in and I asked him that question and his response was, I don't do math next question. And so I failed him. I was the veto and they have this policy where we're friends now, like, They have this policy w…”
Jan 11, 2024
Schillace: Writely migrated onto Google infrastructure during an unnoticed 8-hour window
“When we migrated in to Google, we were very sneaky about it. And we like put the site into quote maintenance mode for eight hours on a Sunday where everything was just read only. And then we migrated all the data and moved everything and brought the new system…”
Jan 11, 2024 neutral
Schillace: Google Docs won market share, but Microsoft kept the money
“In retrospect, they did fine. Like, we took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money, basically. So, you know, we being Google, like, you know, so, like, they survived it. Like, you know, they survived. They did a good job surviving the challenge. …”
Jan 25, 2024 bearish
Moore: I originally thought Google's search data storage model was unaffordable
“When the first time I heard about Google and they said, we're going to save every, we're going to save every search argument. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. They're not gonna be able to afford it.”
Feb 18, 2024 positive
Lemkin: Big tech protects innovation by not firing staff when initiatives fail
“This is something that big companies are actually better at than startups. Which is they don't fire you if the new initiative fails, right? Because then no one at a big company would ever join the new initiative, right? There are exceptions, but no one at Adob…”
Mar 3, 2024 positive
Mar 17, 2024 neutral
Mar 24, 2024 neutral
Rachitsky: Leading US tech and enterprise CEOs were born in India
“Today the CEOs of Microsoft, Alphabet, Adobe, which is a two hundred fifty billion dollar company, turns out, IBM, which is a hundred seventy billion dollar company, Palo Alto Networks, which is a hundred billion dollar company, even Starbucks, also a hundred …”
May 16, 2024 neutral
May 16, 2024 negative
Giant platforms like Nubank and Google can mask failing products for years
“When you have a big app like new bank or places like Google and Facebook, you can make any product look great for months, if not years, because you have such a large customer base, you can always get them to try it with all sorts of basic techniques, but you'r…”
Jun 2, 2024 neutral
Google approaches product management primarily from a technical scaling perspective
“Google's a fantastically engineering driven culture. And the way that they think about product management is mostly in the technical sense of like, Here's a piece of technology. What can that technology do? How do we scale it?”
Jun 27, 2024
Founders with corporate day jobs consistently abandon startups when obstacles arise
“You have to burn the boat because we found that founders who are still getting a paycheck and health insurance
Once the going got tough they did not quit their job. And you need that deterrent, like you sort of need that desperation. Like I have to make this s…”
Jul 21, 2024 negative
Sutherland: Google Glass failed by seeding early units only to developers
“Google Glass, I mean, it was kind of marketing cock up. They launched a bit too soon. Then they only gave the bloody glasses to developers. Now, with the best will of the world, developers probably aren't the world's like coolest people. Okay. They're not the …”
Jul 25, 2024 bearish
Martin: Google's monopoly power and market cap cannot hold back AI search
“So to me, if Google thinks they can, because of their power and the fact they're got a multi-trillion dollar Market cap, and they've got a near monopoly position on, on something they can hold back the tide. You see, the water finds a way to flow, right?”
Jul 28, 2024
Davis: Optimizing for impression share is ego marketing over click share
“It's not about showing as often as possible, because that's what impression share tells you. And that's kind of like ego marketing. I want to be number one. I want to be there all the time. It's about showing to the right person as often as possible. Instead o…”
Jul 28, 2024
Jul 28, 2024 positive
Davis: Every company must invest in paid search due to AI results
“Hot take I would say paid is for everyone. I, if you look at the way each platform is doing Google introducing AI plus with paid taking up like the first four spots, you have to scroll pretty far down to get to an organic listing. Meta. It's almost a pay for p…”
Jul 28, 2024 positive
Davis: Ask ad platform reps for anonymized performance data against top competitors
“Every single platform has partners available... If you give me your, the five people you consider to be your top competitors, I will tell you if you are above or below a certain threshold. Now, they can't tell you CAC because they would have to have transparen…”
Jul 28, 2024 bearish
Jul 28, 2024
Davis: Combining auction metrics effectively reveals genuine competitor threats
“And two of those metrics are position above rate, When we show an amount of times they show and we don't. Add it together, and it will show how often a competitor ranks above you in all auctions you are available for. Using this type of lens is an effective wa…”
Jul 28, 2024
Aug 25, 2024
Bier conditioned a Washington Post interview on an SEO headline clearing Gas
“We met with journalists, reporters to make sure that the number one match, every time you search gas app, human trafficking was gas app is not for human trafficking. And so that ended up being the Washington post headline. We insisted that that be the headline…”
Sep 12, 2024 negative
Sep 19, 2024 neutral
Sep 19, 2024 neutral
Schwartz: Voice Assistants Failed Because They Provided Single Answers Without Choice
“One of the reasons I think these home assistants, whether it's from Google or Apple or Amazon have never taken off is because you don't have choice.
You talk to your Google and it gives you only one answer.
You talk to Amazon and it gives you only one answer.”
Sep 19, 2024 bearish
Sep 19, 2024 neutral
Schwartz: Google Is Legally Prohibited From Providing Exact Ad Search Volumes
“So even Google for, again, for past monopolistic reasons, Google's not allowed to give the real number that they see on Google ads for how many people search it. They have to buy it from another data source and then give that out.”
Sep 19, 2024 neutral
Sep 19, 2024 neutral
Sep 19, 2024 negative
Schwartz: Top-Of-Funnel Search Queries Will Shift Into AI Overviews
“So now a lot of those keywords are going to be moving into these AI overviews. And I don't want to just focus on Google, although I think Google's going to own the entire search page forever and ever for at least for a very long time. But other engines, whethe…”
Sep 19, 2024 bearish
Schwartz: AI Startups Cannot Unseat Google Purely on Search Product Quality
“I don't think there's a chance, and this is the biggest takeaway, I don't think there's a chance that ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude or any of these other LLM startups, because they're startups now, even, even OpenAI as a startup with Bing's part, with Micros…”
Sep 19, 2024 neutral
Schwartz: Google Penalizes Sites Partially to Curb Surging AI Crawling Costs
“And this is a huge issue for Google because the amount of content being created is enormous and it's growing exponentially. And Google's trying to crawl everything. They now have more content to crawl, which becomes more expensive for Google. And which is why …”
Sep 19, 2024 negative
Schwartz: Traditional Link Building Via Paid Guest Posts Is an SEO Myth
“This is the biggest myth in SEO is that you could just build links and link building is, is the secret source and the secret sauce to like growing your SEO footprint. And that's totally wrong because the way most people build links is they buy these guest post…”
Sep 19, 2024 positive
Schwartz: LLMs Let Unlinked Brand Mentions Act Like Traditional HTML Backlinks
“Because the way a link before LLMs and the link, you know, 10 years ago was actually an HTML link. And now Google can read content so they can say, well, you've been mentioned here. That's pretty good. So now we acknowledge that this might be the brand and thi…”
Sep 19, 2024 neutral
Sep 19, 2024 positive
Schwartz: Marketers and SEO practitioners should not worry that AI kills SEO
“I don't think that's at all correct. And I don't think anyone, whether you're doing SEO as your full-time job, whether you're receiving SEO traffic as a part of one of your primary marketing channels, I don't think anybody has to worry about that.”
Sep 26, 2024 positive
Yehoshua: Google's PR head personally called an upset IC engineer
“She was in charge of all of PR and global policy at Google. So huge job. And I emailed Rachel and I'm like, Hey, do you have like an FAQ or something that I can help me? Cause I don't know why you made this change and that I can help explain to the engineer on…”
Sep 26, 2024 positive
Yehoshua: Design for tomorrow's larger user base, not today's
“The number of people using your product today is usually, unless you're a Google, far smaller than the number of people are going to be using your product tomorrow. So design it for the people, the bigger number of people who are going to be using it tomorrow.”
Oct 3, 2024
Komoroske: Teams should spend 70% of their bandwidth on legible work
“Typically what I would advise for PM's approach at Google was, 70% of my effort and my team's effort should go on things that everybody acknowledges are important and useful and create value. Maybe it's boring linear value, but some kind of value. You're tryin…”
Oct 10, 2024 positive
Martin: Google Labs moves fast by drafting specs, designs, and code simultaneously
“In labs, we have the environment to do it. We have the environment to move fast. We have far, far, far fewer processes, maybe even to a fault. Sometimes we'll go to meetings that are literally, you know, the product managers, the engineers, the designers all t…”
Oct 10, 2024 positive
Martin: Google employees use NotebookLM to boost confidence before performance reviews
“Google has these Q three check-ins or like quarterly check-ins where we have to write performance reviews for ourselves and the amount of Googlers... That ping me that I don't even know. And they're like, wow, this was such a boost to my confidence just to upl…”
Oct 27, 2024 negative
Meta argues Apple and Google should handle age verification at OS-level.
“And as a product person, the way that I think this should really work is that instead of everyone entering, you know, teens use on average, 40 apps instead of Instagram and the other 39 apps that teens use trying to verify the age of the person using their app…”
Oct 31, 2024 positive
Great companies require named, templated rituals known by an employee's first Friday
“Great companies have a small list of golden rituals, and they have three tests. And he quickly rattled them off. Number one, they're named. Number two, every employee knows them by their first Friday. And number three, they're templated. And he quickly gave hi…”
Nov 10, 2024 neutral
Rachitsky: Major tech companies hire product managers, not product owners
“Google has no product owners as far as they know. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, like no company you, you've heard of that's a tech company has a product owner. They have, or they're all product managers. They're all product managers.”
Nov 17, 2024
B2B buyers search for simple terms rather than technical industry acronyms
“If you ask our product people and engineers, like, what is our, where does our product fall in terms of category? It would be like CNAP cloud native application protection. But if you go over and you, like, look at Google, like, people are not Googling that wo…”
Dec 8, 2024
Dec 8, 2024 positive
Godin: Marissa Mayer created more value than any other product manager
“Marissa Mayer probably created more stock market value than any other product manager I can think of. And the way she did it was there weren't very many people at Google, but she was the one who said, no, you can't put another button on the homepage. There are…”
Jan 9, 2025 bullish
Jan 9, 2025 neutral
Houston: Incumbent platform bundling acts like a gradual boa constrictor
“There's a big time lag where between when these products launch and when they actually have an impact, because often it's not so much the existence of the product or its availability, it's the sort of Constant bundling or the constant iteration or, you know it…”
Feb 16, 2025
Feb 16, 2025
Levine: Google paid out TomTom's $18M annual contract upon launching proprietary maps
“TomTom was the provider of the maps for Google to do navigation, and they basically say, no, we have our own maps, we are going to terminate the contract, and TomTom said, wait a minute, you are paying us eighteen million dollars a year, and we have five years…”
Feb 16, 2025
Mar 6, 2025 negative
Zhao: Notion rebuilt its codebase because Google Web Components proved too unstable
“Before react wins, there's a competing technology called web component from Google. And it makes sense. Web component feels like a Lego like the building block like, and we're betting on that technology. And then we realized, because it's so new, it's just so …”
Apr 10, 2025 neutral
Weil admits OpenAI no longer holds a massive 12-month lead
“It used to be that OpenAI had this, like, massive model lead, you know, 12 months or something ahead of everybody else. That's not true anymore. You know, I like to think we still have a lead. I'd argue that we do, but it's certainly not a massive one.”
May 11, 2025 positive
Rachitsky: More YC founders come from Palantir than from Google
“And when you look at YC founders and they're where they've come from, I think you may be shared in this in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders in spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger sample size…”
May 22, 2025 positive
May 22, 2025 negative
Founder DNA actively prevents tech giants from succeeding in misaligned product categories
“I have this premise that certain companies can never succeed at certain type of products, right? Like Microsoft with mobile or Google with social or Facebook with enterprise, right? It's just the DNA of the founder actively acts against you succeeding there.”
May 22, 2025
An iOS 4 bug triggered a 1,000x server load spike for Gmail
“And it was a bug in iOS four. This is a long time ago, which caused every single user to pull the entire Gmail inbox, resync the whole inbox. So the bug on the Apple side is going to take two, three weeks to fix. And it was causing like a thousand X load to ou…”
Jun 1, 2025
Kansal: Third- and fourth-place consumer players cannot compete without unique angles
“In consumer markets, if you are player number three or player number four, it's a little hard because the two top players are going to compete with each other so ferociously that it's, especially if they're scale players like Apple and Google, it's difficult f…”
Jun 12, 2025 neutral
Jul 13, 2025
Knapp: A one-week Stockholm browser prototype became Google Meet
“And in that week in Stockholm, we created a prototype instead. We decided, you know what, forget it. We're just going to build something and put it in people's hands, put it in our fellow Googlers hands. And that Prototype was what became Google Meet. It was t…”
Jul 13, 2025 neutral
Knapp: Google teams used 'fast is better than slow' to guide decisions
“When John and I worked at Google back in the 2000, there was this list called 10 things we've found to be true. And one of the things on that list was fast is better than slow. And what was interesting is this is a mantra that you would actually hear people us…”
Jul 17, 2025 bullish
Jul 31, 2025 negative
Aug 17, 2025 bullish
Balfour: Google has a very small window to counter ChatGPT's momentum
“I think the window is very small for them. If chat GPT plays their cards right, because they clearly have the escape velocity right now. And if they just keep pressing that advantage and in the right way, I think it's going to be very hard for Google to counte…”
Aug 17, 2025 bearish
Balfour: Much of Google Gemini's MAU comes from accidental flyby user clicks
“If we could take a look inside their metrics, I think what we would see is a bunch of flyby users. In their mouths. Like they're kind of sprinkling the Gemini bucket everywhere. And I'm, I've like literally clicked on it accidentally multiple times. And so my …”
Sep 14, 2025 positive
Sep 14, 2025 negative
Sep 14, 2025
Sep 14, 2025 neutral
Ethan Smith: AI is only the second-biggest shift in SEO history
“That was probably the biggest shift, which is Google introduced a bunch of algorithms, Panda and similar things to prevent you from doing spam. So essentially you went from SEO being spam to not spam. That was probably the biggest change. And then this is prob…”
Sep 14, 2025 neutral
Sep 14, 2025 neutral
Smith: AEO traffic is falsely attributed to branded search and direct visits
“What they will do is they will open a new tab and they will type in the brand name and they will go to Google and then they'll click on your domain and you will think that it was branded Google search when it wasn't. Or they'll open up a new tab and they will …”
Sep 14, 2025 neutral
Smith: Google intentionally tuned search algorithms to rank Reddit, Twitter, and Quora
“Google has specifically configured their search algorithm to rank Reddit and Twitter and Quora because they want user generated content. And if it wasn't good content, then they would change the algorithm and they wouldn't rank it.”
Sep 14, 2025 neutral
Sep 14, 2025 bullish
Sep 28, 2025 positive
Sep 28, 2025
Changuel: Google Has Dedicated Delight Product Teams for Chrome and Meet
“During my time at Google, I've been the delight PM. So there is even an entire product team who actually work on making sure that the product is delightful. I mean, we do have such a thing for Chrome. We have that for Google Meet. I mean, that's a real thing.”
Oct 10, 2025 positive
Oct 10, 2025
Stein: Product momentum compounds from daily improvements rather than single changes
“I think that a lot of times people ascribe, you know, a lot of momentum to a one time change or a single person, right? I find a lot of this is actually this compounding effect. And you think about just every month, Like ruthlessly improving the product or the…”
Oct 10, 2025 neutral
Stein: Google AI Mode focuses on information, not productivity or creativity
“We are less focused on, you know, creativity, productivity, like upload a spreadsheet and like output graphs for me. Like we're not focused on that. Like we're really focused on what people use Google for and making an AI for that so that you can come to Googl…”
Oct 10, 2025 positive
Stein: Google launched Search Live conversational voice out of Labs
“Funny enough, we actually just launched search live actually out of labs this week. And so you can talk to search in a live AI setting, which is conversational voice, voice on when you're driving, you can just talk all the knowledge I talked about, what you ca…”
Oct 10, 2025 positive
Stein: Core SEO quality signals remain extremely valid for AI search
“There's these best practices that I think still do largely apply because it's gonna ultimately come down to an AI is doing research and finding information. And a lot of the core signals, is this a good piece of information for the question? They're still vali…”
Oct 10, 2025 neutral
Stein: Google AI executes query fan-out with dozens of background searches
“When our AI constructs a response it's actually trying to, it does something called query fan out. Where the model uses Google search as a tool to find, to do other querying. So maybe you're asking about specific shoes. It'll add and append all of these other …”
Oct 10, 2025 negative
Oct 10, 2025 neutral
Oct 10, 2025 positive
Stein: Google is rolling out multi-turn visual search in AI Mode
“There's a visual version of AI mode that basically we talked about for at IO. And so you can reference some of those keynotes, but that that's in the process of being rolled out. And so you're going to be able to now ask like, you know, what's a mid century, m…”
Oct 10, 2025 positive
Stein: New product formats expand platforms rather than replacing core features
“In many ways, the AI version of Google and stories and reels, they're all kind of similar in that they're new formats in the world that people are expecting and wanting more of. And by adding them, It becomes complimentary, not replacement. And in both cases, …”
Oct 10, 2025
Oct 10, 2025
Oct 10, 2025 bullish
Stein: AI models increasingly do not require heavy fine-tuning for sophisticated outcomes
“I think it's gonna open up a lot of this democratization of accessing these models and building incredible things. Cause you don't even need to do a lot to get the most sophisticated outcomes. Increasingly. I don't think you need to do a lot of this heavy duty…”
Oct 10, 2025 positive
Stein: Users are bringing complex calculations and visual questions to Google Search
“What we found is that people Are asking these questions in Google, like they're trying to get this out of Google. And so if you can just have an AI that's powerful enough to answer a really hard calculation, someone's trying to figure out or like take a pictur…”
Oct 10, 2025 bullish
Oct 26, 2025
Nov 20, 2025 negative
Nov 30, 2025 positive
Vercel uses Chrome traffic data to promote leads into enterprise sales tiers
“We also do the same thing on growth potential because we are similarly a consumption-based business, but for us a couple other things on the x-axis, we layer in promote, which is one of the things that is observable is traffic, site traffic on the internet. So…”
Dec 18, 2025 bullish
Subsidizing free AI usage is more cost-effective than Google search ads
“Honestly, it's more efficient way to do paid marketing almost in a sense because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared to if we were trying to compute it on the Google. So yes and no to your statement, because it actually does…”
Dec 18, 2025 negative
Jan 15, 2026 neutral
Lessin: Only 0.1% of startups have breakthroughs powerful enough to ignore etiquette
“It is true that if you bring manna from heaven, right, like you invent something that is literally the next Google or whatever out of pure thought, That sometimes none of this stuff matters, right? Like if you just, if you fully, that's it, you know, it's like…”
Jan 18, 2026 bullish
Feb 12, 2026
Wu: AI startups fail from lack of customer resonance, not OpenAI competition
“Every startup that I've seen that is kind of fizzled out is not because open AI or, you know, big lab or Google or something has come to squash them. It's because they built something and it like really didn't resonate with the customers.”
Feb 15, 2026 negative
Mar 8, 2026 negative
Apr 2, 2026 positive
Willison: LLM search integration is now better at searching than humans
“Now that all of the major models have really good search integration, they're just better at searching than I am. I can ask them a question and watch them fire off five searches in parallel for like aspects of answering that question, pull the data back.”
Apr 12, 2026 negative
May 10, 2026 negative
May 10, 2026
Ries: Corporate values are lies without an enforceable operational apparatus
“Google report its quarterly report on time because there is a massive, unbelievably expensive apparatus to make sure it happens every time. And don't be evil was just a slogan. So if someone tells you I'm serious about something, great. Now show me the apparat…”
May 31, 2026 bullish
Evans: Major tech incumbents are unlikely to be fundamentally disrupted by AI
“You can look at, you know, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and say, it's hard to see a problem for them, really, with all of this. You can certainly see questions for all of them and one of them may drop the ball, but it's worth, you know, kind of remembering…”
Jun 7, 2026 negative
Fadell: Apple and Google should do much more for digital well-being
“I still think that the platform companies like Google and Apple could be doing a lot more around digital consumption tools and information to help people make better decisions for themselves, for their families, and what have you, because, you know, you could …”
Jun 7, 2026 negative
Jun 7, 2026 bullish
Sep 6, 2026 bearish
Sep 6, 2026 positive
Google team completes two-year product roadmap in three months using AI
“Anecdotally, I talked to a good friend who's an executive at Google and I said, Hey, have you laid anyone off? And he said, No, we didn't. What we instead do is now rip through our roadmap. So two years of roadmap happens in three months. And we're actually, o…”