Google’s - Project Oxygen

Prasad Setty – Google’s Vice President (People analytics & compensation).

November 2012, celebratory dinner at Union Square, San Francisco’s top restaurant. For
employees working on Project Oxygen & celebrate project’s success.

Laszlo Bock – Senior Vice President (People Operations) – said about project – “a revolution in
people management at Google”

Oxygen Initiative started in 2000s – with the question raised by Google’s executives – “Do
Manager matter?”

Company Background:
Google founded - 1998 by Sergey Brin & Larry Page (Computer science students from Stanford
University).
Within a year - raised $26 Billion from investors.
Late 1999 - shifted headquarters to Mountain View, California.

Business Overview:
Late 2000 – partnered with AOL & Yahoo.
2001 – Page (President, Products) & Brin (President, technology) took title of President. Hired-
former Novell CEO, Eric Schmidt as Google’s CEO.
2000 – introduced keyword targeted ad program called AdWords. Its click-through rates were four
times higher than industry average at that time. This enabled them to start making profits, by late
2001- Google was profitable.
AdWords in 2002 – revenue $440 million, $100 million Profit.
By 2011, revenue $37.9 billion, $9.7billion net income.

Culture:
From beginning they established an informal culture.
• Exercise Balls were repurposed as movable chairs.
• Desks were made from wooden doors.
• Dogs were allowed at work.
• Founders - also hired chefs to provide free meals to all employees.
• Provide – free breakfast, lunch, dinner & free use of workout facilities.
The culture was designed to encourage teamwork for development of rapid ideas.
Engineering dominated Culture.