Catching up with Google Canada’s Chris O’Neill

Chris O’Neill, Managing Director of Google Canada recently visited Edmonton to speak to the 2013 Alberta Venture Forum. We had a little chat about all things Google, which this September celebrated its 15^th anniversary.

How should companies handle risks and failure?

I wouldn’t suggest a one size fits all approach, but I do think the mentality is important. I mean, having a portion of what you think about that is experimental where your tolerance for risk of failure is much higher. A company can decide if it’s five, 10 or 15 per cent of what they do. Challenge the way you do something and take a risk and be OK with failure in that portion. It’s analogous to a financial portfolio where you want to have base level investments where they can perform and you can sleep at night and also some investments that have a little more risk.

Has there been a fundamental change how we work?

It used to be that controlling secrets was power but the paradigm of controlling information as a source of power is shifting now to sharing data as a source of power in collaborative workspaces.

What is your job?

My job is pretty broad. To earn the love of our yes advertisers, our publishing partners and our users who use the web in a way that works for them. I’m also responsible to make sure that the business and lots of different functions perform well against a common vision and making sure we are well resourced and making the right bet, taking enough risk and when we make mistakes, when we have failures that we get back up.

Where do Google ideas come from?

Innovation can happen anywhere, top-down or bottom-up. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is very focused on Google X, moonshot big ideas that are very transformative in solving big problems in the world. Part of that was Google Glass. The very notion of wearable computing and what that might do…the way he describes it is “put the technology to work so it can get out of your way.” But the majority of innovation happens from the bottom up. Somebody has an idea, they build a prototype, it’s dog fooded (tested) and people either like it, it gets traction, or we don’t. Like the Google Art project started by one of our teams in Spain, who had this vision of wouldn’t it be great to bring the Prado and other museums to people in rural India who will never get a chance to actually experience the beauty of that.  From that little spark of an idea we now have countless museums with tens of thousands of pieces or art that are on display.

What about ideas from Google Canada?

Gmail on an iPad. Obviously Apple was not giving us advanced notice on when their first new device was coming up so our Waterloo engineering team made some informed guesses on what the parameters of the new tablet would be…they even had a few prototypes of their own. When the launch date was announced, the team drove down to Buffalo, set up camp in a hotel, went to Best Buy, got the devices and built a Gmail prototype in 48 hours.

Does everything Google do make money?

No, we first ask ourselves, are we are solving a big problem? Can we materially improve the lives of someone, ideally a billion plus people, in a way that would add value to their world? Sometimes big, sometimes small. We then build products and services that connect people …and then we test it to make sure we are delivering on that promise.  But we don’t ask the question “can we make money?” If any great tech company is creating a disproportional amount of value for its customers that user base will grow and only then do you ask, how do you make money to sustain it?

What services did you provide in Canada that were not money makers?

We also believe in making a net contribution to the society in which we operate and live in. So when we decided to take Street View cameras up to the Arctic last year it was about connecting the country and providing access to and literally putting parts of Canada on the map that haven’t existed before. That was not a money making effort.

How are you different from Apple?

First, we compete against ourselves. Can we dream big enough, can we be creative and stay in tune with consumers? On Apple, we differ in that we take a stance that open is better than closed.  Apple has beautiful products and is able to deliver with a closed eco system from end to end. We happen to believe that open is a better way to fuel bigger and broader innovation for more people in the world. We acquired the open source Android smartphone operating system from an eight-person company in 2005 who believed in the same thing.

What industries do you believe need to change their way of doing things?

Education and health care are ripe for innovation in our lifetime. Instead of children using the classroom as lecture time and sometimes doing or sometimes not doing work at home, I believe in working through problems in the classroom. Today’s education notion of fixed time and fixed space now changes to unlimited space, fixed learning and variable time. Affordable hardware tablet technology like our Nexus and software technology allows you to do that, where students can coach and mentor each other complimenting on their weaknesses and strengths. I am a big believer in MOOCs, Massively Online Open Classrooms, where anyone can get a world class university education, for example, from Stanford University.

This week on Sept 18 Google announced the creation of a new company called Calico to make improvements in human health and well-being. How will that work?

I can’t talk about that at this early stage, but healthcare will be re-invented before education, because it needs to be. The economics are broken in every fundamental way and getting worse with an aging population. There is an explosion of released medical data studies underway and technology exists to handle this big data in a way to help us find, predict and detect disease earlier and faster.

What do you think the next big thing is going to be?

I think some of our moonshots are foreshadowing that. Internet access is probably the most transformative thing that will happen in our lifetime. More than two billion people access the web now and there will be several billion more coming on in the next decade. That is huge and we can’t even begin to think of what that’s going to be. I also think wearable computing is a mega trend and the notion of having lots of sensors and things that can assist us on our life in small ways and big ways will be interesting. One more is the Internet of things, the notion that devices will interact to be aware of one another and value in ways we can only start to imagine right now.