Top Highlights

• "You must have at least three hundred people," he said to an engineering manager one Friday. "So over the course of a week, that makes six man-years. If this were the list of my accomplishments after six years of work, I would be pretty embarrassed."
• "Your greatest impact as an engineer comes through hiring someone who is as good as you or better," he exhorted everyone who would listen, "because over the next year, they double your productivity. There's nothing else you can do to double your productivity. Even if you're a genius, that's extremely unlikely to happen."
• "Objectives," Doerr instructed Larry and Sergey, "should be significant and communicate action. They state what you want to accomplish, while key results detail how you will accomplish those goals." Key results, therefore, should be aggressive, measurable, and time-specific. Doerr warned the founders not to overdo it: five objectives with four key ...
• Larry's Rules of Order: Don't delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster. Don't get in the way if you're not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else. Don't be a bureaucrat. Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is junior doesn't mean they don't d...
• "You have to say both emotionally and intellectually, 'I can only work so many hours. The best I can do is make good use of these hours and prioritize the right way so I spend my time on the things that are most important.' Then if I see something below the line that is broken and I can fix it, it's important not to try to fix it. Because you're go...