I left Google in August, 2007 to follow my dreams to co-found a new start-up with my friend
Dennis Fong in online gaming named
Raptr. Many of my friends thought I was crazy for leaving the #1 place to work for in America. I thought I was crazy for leaving at the time too :). But looking back nine months from now, it don't regret moving on to take the plunge to join the start-up world.
Other ex-
Googlers will agree that leaving Google is not that easy. In fact, Google makes it so hard for you to leave I described my experience to my friends as breaking up with a long time girl friend who pampers me, understands me and loves me dearly.
Working at Google was different from working for any other company I'd ever worked for in the past. Instead of feeling I was working
for a company, they made every effort to make me feel I was
part of the company from the very first day I joined. I guess since everyone had to go through the grilling interview process, everyone was treated with respect from day one. A lot of companies at this size would have a deep organization chart - so deep that after awhile you have no clue how your work impacts the company anymore. Google management trusted its employees by sharing its vision and secrets to its employees openly. Employees at other companies may leak those info immediately, but this rarely happened during my time at Google. I had an awesome manager who really trusted in me and gave me the freedom to do what I wanted. Everyone was highly academic, and you're encouraged to continue to learn through internal and external Tech Talks all the time. It was the closest thing to going to college without going to college. It was my dream job. I remember saying to myself that wow, this place is awesome. I can see myself working here for decades!
I can also talk forever about how hard it was to walk away awesome perks like the good food, snacks, free gym, discounted massages, ski trips, crazy X-mas parties, sand volleyball court, etc, etc. But the hardest thing to walk away from was all the phenomenal Engineers whom I got to work with there. I really feel fortunate to have been surrounded by so many Engineers who are not just brilliantly smart, but are also nice, modest, and self-driven. While I was there, I had the chance to launch over 50+ products (Video, Checkout, Docs & Spreadsheets to name a few) and work with 500+ engineers. I learned all about how to design and deploy complex web infrastructure, and mostly importantly I became good friends with many people that will last for a life time.
So given all the good things I've got to say about Google, why did I decide to leave? I knew I was pretty good at what I was doing at Google, and I knew I could continue to stay happy doing working there. However, I was 28 at the time and I had never worked full time at a start-up before. Being inherently a pretty entrepreneurial person, I guess you could say that I had the itch to find out what it's really like to be at a start-up from ground up. So when my friend
Dennis approached me to be part of the founding team of his new company, I knew it was an opportunity for me to apply what I'd learned from Google to take on a bigger challenge in my career. I was of course a bit worried at the beginning for leaving a bigger company and joining a risky venture, but I soon realized that if things did not work out, I knew I could always go back to the big corporation world.
It has definitely been fun working at
Raptr so far. We grew the company from a team of four at the beginning to 13 in a little less than eight months. Being at a small company, I have the opportunity to not only work with a
small group of bright, talented people, but I also get to wear many different hats and be exposed to the blueprint of how to start and run a company from the first day and the decision making that goes on at every single stage of a company. There are also many things that I learned from the Google culture that I am now trying to apply to a start up, but I will save the details for another post. :)
My experience at Google will stay dearly in my heart. I plan to continue to keep in close touch with all the
Googlers I've come to know. Hopefully one day I'll get the opportunity with some of them again. Google is a great company and will continue to stay great for decades to come. It would be cool to one day tell my future grandchildren that "Yes. Your grandpa once worked at Google and used to play volleyball with
Sergey Brin back in the day."
