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Google's first employee

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11–20 of 48 posts

Re: Google's first employee

#12
post #11

He got 1600 (perfect score) on SATs. I wonder what the relationship of SAT scores and highly successful people is.

>I feel a lot of our success is due to luck. I guess what I'm most proud of is successfully keeping the culture as well as we have, given all the success and growth that we've had.

Suggests that he wouldn't believe there to be a direct correlation.

Re: Google's first employee

#14
post #11

He got 1600 (perfect score) on SATs. I wonder what the relationship of SAT scores and highly successful people is.

Most smart people I know got a 'good' (say, better than ~1400ish) score on the SAT. I can't tell the difference between someone I work with who got a 1450 and a 1550 though (unless they tell me, of course).

Re: Google's first employee

#15
post #2

I took more notes the first time Craig spoke at YC than I've done with any other speaker. Most of the time I only write down one or two sentences. The first time Craig spoke I took 4 pages of notes.

Can you please share the notes?

Re: Google's first employee

#16
post #5

"A There are these cultures you see in some companies -- they are just very negative, where the way that you show you are the hot shot engineer is by showing how stupid everyone else's idea is, or how bad everyone else's code is. And honestly, we see that more at Google now then we used to when it was small. And part of it is we've got people who were used to these other cultures; it's a very prevalent, sort of alpha…

Yeah, I think part of how google does it is you have people like Guido who are super humble and helpful to everyone. That was generally true of the smartest folks at google and it just set a really good example; people weren't afraid to "look stupid".

Re: Google's first employee

#17
post #11

He got 1600 (perfect score) on SATs. I wonder what the relationship of SAT scores and highly successful people is.

Not all successful people have very high SAT scores, not all people with very high SAT scores are successful, but I would guess among very successful people there will be disproportionately many people with very high SAT scores.

Anecdotally, Bill Gates and Paul Allen come to mind (I think one had perfect score and one just a tiny bit less).

Also Drew Houston of Dropbox put his perfect score on Y Combinator application (which pg put as an example of successful application despite Drew having dreaded single-founder handicap :).

Re: Google's first employee

#18
I started here at Google NYC not too long ago, and was surprised to find Craig inconspicuously sitting at a desk across the room, tapping away at his keyboard. Some folks around here don't even know who he is.

Re: Google's first employee

#19
post #7

I'm not sure if the parent link works or not, it didn't work for me. I believe this is the article linked. http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/pr... Edit: Nevermind, now it wants to work. Although I did link to the print version, incase anyone wants that instead.

I had problems with it too, but got this working: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_16291970

Yes, you need to drop the query string from such URL's. This has been the case with at least one other recent Mercury News post.

Re: Google's first employee

#20
post #9
post #2

I took more notes the first time Craig spoke at YC than I've done with any other speaker. Most of the time I only write down one or two sentences. The first time Craig spoke I took 4 pages of notes.

What made his remarks so notable?

He was the only one besides Larry and Sergey who had first hand knowledge of some of the stuff he talked about, because for quite a long time the company was just those three.
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