[nostrademons]

Maybe this is a quirk of my personality, but I'm interested personally in solving a lot of problems. From what I saw of Larry Page's decision-making when I was at Google, this was true of him as well. From there, it's a matter of choosing the intersection of that set with the set of problems that many other people want solved and the set of problems that you personally have the ability to make a dent in right now.

Business books like to talk about the "hedgehog" principle:

http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133

This is what it means in practice. It helps if all of the sets are relatively large, and the intersection is quite narrowly focused. Usually when I've had "small" successes (projects beloved by a handful of users, but not enough to make any money), it's because I was following my passion but not considering how many other people cared about the problem. When I've had outright failures (like the graveyard of projects that I never completed), it was when I followed my passion for a project that large amounts of people would want, but didn't pay any attention to whether the problem was tractable with the resources I had available to me.

[ryancarson]

Interesting that you were at Google. What did you do there?

I'm just finishing "I'm Feeling Lucky" about Google's early days.

[nostrademons]

I was in Search from 2009-2014. Worked on a bunch of projects - 3 visual redesigns, the Authorship program, some miscellaneous infrastructure & internal research projects, 3 interactive homepage doodles, about 1/3 of the easter eggs you see on Wikipedia's list of Google easter eggs, loaned out to GFiber and G+ for their launches, a few other things. It was already a big company by the time I got there, but I had the pleasure of working with several folks who'd been there since it was just a couple hundred people. It was also a pretty interesting time in its history - the first half of my tenure was when Bing was still considered a scary competitor, so we pushed out a lot of innovations in a short time period - and I straddled the Eric Schmidt / Larry Page CEO turnover, so had experience under both CEOs.

[ryancarson]

You should blog about it!

[nostrademons]

Some day, maybe. For now, I'm much more focused on getting my next great adventure off the ground (which I'm also not really seeking publicity for...my cofounder and I are trying to go directly to target users for feedback and not the general public). Plus, one thing I learned at Google is that there are a large number of employees that do awesome work without seeking credit for it...I was happy to be one of them at the time, and I don't really want to steal the limelight from them.