I suppose it depends on your personality, perspective and how you grow your company's culture.
I just finished reading Tony Hsieh's upcoming book, Delivering Happiness. He describes how LinkExchange, his first big company, became boring to grow because the company culture wasn't fun. But he still enjoys working at Zappos because he and his execs managed to keep the company culture fun and interesting. He doesn't know everyone there, but it has a great feel to it. Keeping his employees engaged, serving his customers, etc. are all great joys to him.
Note that I'm not saying Zappos still feels like a startup. I think from the book it's apparent that it doesn't have a startup culture at all. But it does have an "engaged" culture. Everyone enjoys what they do.
Side note: I don't recommend reading the book. There are about 10 pages in it I actually felt I could generalize to be useful.
I disagree. The problem isn't that you need money to motivate you in the later stage of building your company. No, you're trying to be motivated by the wrong thing. You need to seek ulterior motivation. Passion, purpose, vision. I think that's how Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Richard Branson and countless others built their companies. It wasn't money. It was vision. Vision to change the world.
Then the primary driver is not a vision of technology as such, it is political: If you aim to change (or rule) the world, bigger is always better (as bigger equals more power, people and money to change the world according to your vision) and you never run out of challenges.
I suppose a Leonardo da Vinci quote is appropriate:
It had long since come to my attention that people of
accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to
them. They went out and happened to things.
Then I suppose it becomes mostly a matter of scaling the vision along with the size of the company. And the ability to keep the vision alive without drowning in administrative day-to-day tasks.
> And even if plenty of the code behind [scaling search] must be very interesting, the actual money is made in the adsense department, and though at that scale there are some interesting challenges, keyword advertising, statistics, reporting and so on are nowhere near as interesting as search.
If you don't think adsense is just as interesting as search in the core technical algorithms, you probably haven't really thought about it at all.
Adsense at that scale has interesting challenges, but I don't think it compares in scope to indexing the web and making it accessible.
Agreed that it is a far from trivial problem, but the dataset is relatively limited in comparison the biggest hurdles are to get it to match up with a reasonable ad on first delivery within a given timespan, to track all the statistics and especially to combat click fraud in the network.
But in the end, without a search engine to display those ads on google would be just another advertising agency, and in many ways they are.
A better example of an interesting challenge would be to transform google news in such a way that it would show you only relevant news. There is a lot of room for improvement there and it would boost natural language processing a lot to have the tech to do that.
Any piece of tech has interesting components, but that's a relatively small part of the whole, and the money is made in the drudge-work, that was exactly the point.
From a start-up perspective, the 'core' engine of the product is probably relatively complete by launch day, but the infrastructure to make it scale, to market and monetize it, which is going to be a whole lot less sexy, is where the money eventually will come from.
Just like only showing relevant news is an interesting challenge, so is only showing relevant ads. Advertisers don't want to show you ads you're not interested in; they want to show you ads you'll actually find useful. In many ways, that's a much more interesting challenge than showing relevant news.
Extending the advertising example, it's also a very interesting challenge to show people that highly-targeted ads can be a good thing. Just like it's an interesting challenge to convince advertisers to use your ad platform. Although they are not technical challenges, they are very interesting business challenges.
The "indexing the web" aspect is more of a systems engineering problem than a core algorithm problem. Scaling and systems work usually appeals to a completely different sort of engineer than those who develop algorithms.
I would argue that developing the original work for displaying relevant adsense ads would appeal more to the algorithm developer than scaling out search would.
Edit, I re-read your post and you seem to realize this so I don't understand where you were going with your comment in the original article.
The adsense example was made to point out that in order to make search a profitable business a lot of stuff needed to be built that has nothing to do with the 'search' product per se, it is the life support machine that allows 'search' to exist.
I could have probably picked a better example because, as has already been pointed out there are lots of interesting sub-problems in keyword based advertising.
Maybe I should have used an online advertising agency as the example, with the ad-matcher as the example of an algorithmically interesting item and the reporting, the statistics and the help desk as the infra structure.
One of my favorite insights from Steve Blank is "you fail if you stay a startup." I strongly recommend watching his Startup Lessons Learned Conference presentation (link below). The differences between startups and established companies run deep and most entrepreneurs don't make the transition from the former to the latter.
I'm just in the beginning stages of a start-up. I know that is exactly how I'll feel once the initial challenges are surmounted.
I love the initial challenges; dealing with the first customers. But staying at the head (or near head) of a company when it just becomes another corp? Never. Boring. :-)
Counterpoint: Running a startup means working 18 hour days trying a bunch of stuff that probably won't work and if it does then you end up in a job you don't like. Growing a business means helping something along that will have lasting value. Just depends what type of person you are; making a blanket statement that growing a business is boring is actually pretty narrow minded.
(Disclaimer: I work at a startup, love it, and will probably work at or start another startup in the future)
> I work at a startup, love it, and will probably work at or start another startup in the future
Doesn't that sort of prove my point though? Why not stick around and grow it then?
Isn't the 'what kind of person you are' part the whole point of what I wrote ?
Some people are good at creation and the work that comes with that small team where you can wear a whole bunch of hats, they thrive in that environment, but they find that it is much harder to maintain that attitude in larger companies.
Suddenly there are procedures and forms to be filled out and all kinds of corporate stuff that will drag you down. You can only work on weekdays, you have to work between 9 and 5 (hey, I'm a night person), and so on.
I remember that when working for a large corporation (bank) early on in my career after I switched to the IT department someone came up to me and asked me not to work so hard because I made some of the others on the team look bad. They were actually trying to slow me down, can you imagine that sort of thing in a start-up?
I'd work for any start-up that has a technically challenging idea, even without pay if the idea was worthwhile enough in my opinion, but I'd have a really hard time joining up with some 200 employee company that does the same thing, or hanging around if the idea was received well by the market and the company needed growing to that level.
Sooner or later your tech days are over and you'll find yourself to be a 'manager', and not everybody is cut out to be one. The choice then is to hang on to the start-up that you helped found and manage people or to hang on and be managed by some guy hired two years after you founded the thing.
I'd rather move on at that stage. In the past this has led to school friends of mine that had also gone in to programming to be hired by start-ups that I helped found, 20 years on and they're still working there.
I could have never done that, compared to what I've seen in the last 20 years that sounds like being tied to the same disneyland ride for two decades.
I just finished reading Tony Hsieh's upcoming book, Delivering Happiness. He describes how LinkExchange, his first big company, became boring to grow because the company culture wasn't fun. But he still enjoys working at Zappos because he and his execs managed to keep the company culture fun and interesting. He doesn't know everyone there, but it has a great feel to it. Keeping his employees engaged, serving his customers, etc. are all great joys to him.
Note that I'm not saying Zappos still feels like a startup. I think from the book it's apparent that it doesn't have a startup culture at all. But it does have an "engaged" culture. Everyone enjoys what they do.
Side note: I don't recommend reading the book. There are about 10 pages in it I actually felt I could generalize to be useful.