Lisa ROUX – EDHEC GMC

Clara Yeohyun Yoon, an employee at Google, gave us a very relevant presentation on the background of
Google. It was divided into 4 parts. In the first part, she presented Google's History and Mission. In a
second part, she talked about Google's Projects and Principles of Innovation. Then, she focused on the
impact of Google in Asia. Finally, how to become a Googler.

The story of the giant Google began with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then students at Stanford, who joined
their forces in a California garage.

Like all the online platforms we've seen before (like Grab, which is obviously tiny in scale compared to
Google), they've had to adapt over time and are becoming more and more powerful and design-led thanks
to the huge evolution of technology. The picture below highlights the design of the first search engine.

It is impressive to see what the data center looked like 25 years ago compared to today.

25 years ago Today

Google’s Network Infrastructure team designs : Datacenters, Networks, Software… to turn a network of
computers into a single global computer.

Google has more than 20 data centers globally, as

Oregon Data Center, as you can see on the picture
below. We can easily understand that what happened
behind the scene is very different than what we can
notice at our level.

Google is part of the Alphabet Group, which is a grouping of various large companies (Youtube, Maps,
Android ...) Google is the largest member.
The very first video published on Youtube is "Me at the Zoo" in 2005. Moreover, the most viewed video
of all time is "Baby Shark", sung by a Korean family. This highlights that a lot of Asian content are
becoming viral.

The Google's Mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and
useful. Today, thanks to Google's extremely advanced technology, Gmail is able to recognize a spam
email from a useful email, Google translate allows you to translate your Korean menu at a restaurant
with only a picture. Google is not only a software but also a hardware, with notably the implementation
of Google Home.

It exists 5 principles of Innovation :

- Focus on User : Innovation fountain starts with User Experience that comes before making money.
- Fail quickly and learn : For example, Google had released glasses that were very expensive (around
1000€) and that did not solve the consumer's problems. The project was quickly stopped.
- Share everything
- Data, not opinions : For example, data shows that 27% of student loan searchers are 45-54 years old.
- Let people pursue their dreams : Individuals and small teams can have a massive impact. They can
create new ideas, experiment, fail and try again and get their success to global markets.

Search engine market share differs a lot by country, in Asia. For example, in South Korea there is a
strong dominance of Naver.

Asia is also a key market for Youtube. India is the country with the most users (+ 225 million) and Japan
4th user worldwide (+ 60 million).

How to become a Googler ?

There are many elements of Googleness. Here are just a few examples :

- Teamwork : Participate in as many team projects as possible, practice how to collaborate and foster
effective team dynamics
- Leardership : It's not just about being a " team leader ". It includes everything from project planning
to prioritization, strive for self development.
- Data-Driven Mindset : relevant information and data, identifies solutions and make decisions that
focus on impact.