Nikesh Arora joined Google in 2004 and went on to become head of the company?s global sales operations and business development. In this Idea Exchange moderated by Assistant Editor Amulya Gopalakrishnan, he talks about Google?s success story and democratic work ethics, the issue of privacy and how the digital world has bridged the information gap

Amulya Gopalakrishnan: Your work affects us pretty intimately, given how much Google is a part of our lives.

I have been with Google for five-and-a-half years. I joined in 2004, when the company had about $2.5 billion in revenue. We had some $25 billion last year. So that?s five years and 10 times the amount. It is the fastest revenue growth of any company in the history of business. Microsoft took 30 years to get their first billion dollars, we took five years. The problem we have is that if no one has ever done it before, you are charting a new course and you have to figure out how to scale the business. When you are trying to do everything so fast, you can?t do everything right. So you do what is most important first. Sometimes I like to say we are that kid dressed up in a man?s suit at a funeral: suddenly he?s got all these responsibilities but at the end of the day, he is still an 11-year-old child who now has to behave like an adult.

Coomi Kapoor: Can you talk a bit about the success story of Google?

I think it?s not just Google?s success story. I think it?s a success story which you are going to see repeated again and again. There were predecessors to Google. There was Yahoo!, which was phenomenally successful in a shorter period of time than any other company. Then there was Google, followed by YouTube. And now YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world because a lot of people search on it for video content. You have seen Facebook and most recently, Twitter. All these things are happening much faster because you have more and more people connected?almost 1.4 billion people are connected in the world. Imagine starting a newspaper in a country of 10 million people in the past. You couldn?t have sold the paper to 10 million people because there were language issues, regional considerations, all these things posed genuine hurdles. Internet has no such boundaries, you can reach out to 1.4 billion people. You tweet right now and the world will be able to see your tweet instantaneously. You don?t have to get a distribution licence, you don?t have to go and deliver the product somewhere. You can touch a base of 1.4 billion consumers out there in the world and that?s why any search engine launched on the Web can be picked by anyone. Innovation continues to grow faster and faster. I remember a time in India when there were products we never got. Even now there are products that are not distributed in the country. That?s not true for the Internet. The Internet for the first time allows 1.4 billion people to access these products and services. That?s why we see this rapid growth phase of new companies.

There are certain things specific to our company. We wanted to hire people, always. But we won?t hire people unless we find the best people because once you start hiring people who do 50 per cent of the job, you feel, at least I am getting 50 per cent. But we want 100 per cent or better. We always want to make sure that the users are on top of our minds and so everything is done from the users? perspective. There are no other stakeholders. There is only one person we care about and that?s the user. Everybody else just falls in line behind them. We run the company differently. We run it from the perspective that it?s about letting people do their best. What?s fascinating is that there?s always a balance between discipline, control and innovation. If I give you the corporate handbook when you walk in and tell you to read 200 pages and work in a certain way, you are being bound too tightly and you?ll feel that you don?t have enough freedom. You have got to find that balance?how to get a group of people self-organised, try to head them in the right direction, help them correct that direction but don?t steer them too hard because then you are sending them where you want to send them and not where they want to go. That?s the struggle we have. You have to let that creative chaos get into the business. You have to accept failure, people will make mistakes. Failure is very hard for a traditional company to deal with. In a traditional company, if you don?t meet your numbers by the 31st, you?re fired.

Coomi Kapoor: What?s the average age of people at the top management level at Google and what is the work culture?

The founders are young at 35, 36 years of age. They were 25 when they founded the company and 28 when they hired me. Most of my colleagues are older than me, though not by much. The office culture at Google is very democratic. The top honchos are the people with the best ideas. When you walk into a meeting, all are equal. There is only one arbitrator, that is the CEO. He arbitrates but he doesn?t dictate. We have very heated arguments at the meetings. Sometimes it?s managed, sometimes it?s chaotic. Some innovators who created Gmail, Chrome, Android are better paid than some senior executives. They are the true leaders. If you don?t take care of them, they will go somewhere else.

Amulya Gopalakrishnan: How do you see customer behaviour now? About 10 years ago a lot of people were not dependent on the Internet for doing business.

Ten years ago, there were 300 million people on the Internet, and about 120 million people connected with broadband. Now, there are 1.4 billion people using the Internet and 500 million broadband users. So the scale is very different. Customer behaviour has changed a lot. Ten years ago, people did not have access to all kinds of products on the Internet as the companies had not set up their websites. Now around $200 billion worth of commerce is conducted on the Internet along with $80 to $90 billion of advertising. So there are viable business opportunities through the Internet.

Dhiraj Nayyar: News websites now get a lot of eyeballs but they don?t know how to monetise those eyeballs. What do you think?

The monetisation model is very clear: how much money can you make from the page on the Web? You can say people are not paying enough or the product is overpriced or there are too many products available. Fifteen years before, when you wanted a news story, you waited for it to come on the television or you bought a newspaper. Today, you search it on the Internet. The Internet has changed the cost of production. Anybody can produce. So where is your brand value? Your brand value is in authentication, in validation and in making sure the product is always good. An authentic brand is more likely to sell news on the Internet than paste it for free viewing. For instance, around 10 years back, you had a press conference with 300 journalists in the room and they all went to their offices, wrote the story in the local languages and published it for their consumers. Now, the entire process takes merely an hour. Now the problem is excess content. So I think there should be some rationalisation on the availability of content. When there is a match between the demand and the supply, you get pricing power. When there is excess supply, you don?t have that much pricing power. This is the basic economic model.

Utsah kohli: What is the future of a viable news business?

With any technology transition, some businesses have to be reshaped. When cars were introduced, the horse carriages, including those fitted with motors, could not compete. There was no way to save that industry. If everybody starts consuming content in some shape or form digitally, you have to find a solution to it. Let me make a broad generalisation: today a lot of media websites have a production-oriented mindset. Every media house takes whatever it produces and puts it on the Web. Not many have gone back and said, what is the consumers? news experience on the Web? I call it the ?unbundling? of the newspaper. Ten years back, I used to read newspapers, cover to cover. Today, I go to the Internet for any news, be it weather or stocks, because I want real time news. So newspapers are gradually unbundled. If I want to read Indian news, I don?t read The New York Times. It has only one page for international news. I have a bigger appetite for news. So I read it on the Internet.

Amulya Gopalakrishnan: Given Google?s global ambitions, why is there a lot of nervousness about privacy and antitrust issues?

I don?t know if there is an easy answer to that question because the nervousness is the fear of the unknown, or the fear of unchartered territories and new places. We happen to have become the poster child because we have become successful on the Internet. The flip side is that this is the challenge every technology business will have to face. Everything that happens on Google happens on the Web properties of news websites too. You can track the advertisers and the customers as well. The digital world creates these challenges as distribution has become easy. This is a broader problem caused by the Internet. These problems have to be solved through a lot of conversation and education. The regulators need to be trained. When the laws are crafted to fight these problems, either they will harm the growth of the Internet or boost it.

Anushree Majumdar: Google has not had an easy relationship with China and recently your company provided access to censored sites to users in Hong Kong. So, if you are a user in China, how can you still access Google?

Just the way you can access google.com in the US from here. You can have access to google.israel or .turkey from here. If you go to Google and decide not to watch Google India, you can go to any Google site in the world. Similarly, Chinese users can go to a Chinese language site in Hong Kong.

Sanjeev Gera: Is Google always going to change the face of the company? Are we going to see a new Google after a span of time with your innovative policies?

From our perspective, the challenge is the way we run the company. We have this rule called 70:20:10. About 70 per cent of the time we expect people to work on core projects, 20 per cent of the time they can work on related projects of technology and 10 per cent of the time, they can work on anything. Most of the time we don?t know what they are working on until the work becomes big enough. We usually don?t stop anybody coming up with big ideas. The better way to think about it is to think about the user. I, as a user, have three things to interact with to have access to information. One is my device, the second is the application or the content and the third is the pipe which goes from the device to the rest of the devices. In these three areas, we have to make sure technology improves. If you think in that context, on the user application side, we have search, we have Gmail, we have Google Maps, we have YouTube. On the device side, we have all the operating systems to connect the unconnected world. Our motivation at Google is to apply technology and skill to problems that people are facing and remove the barriers. If we come across a technological challenge and find it interesting, we?ll go after it. I can?t give you a three-year or a five-year plan because we don?t work like that.

Nandagopal Rajan: Don?t you think Google is dabbling in too many things now?

This is the power of innovation and chaos. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Some of them, you?ll put more weight behind. We sell 60,000 Android phones per day. Is that a dabble, or is that a good product? We have tens of millions of users on Gmail. Is that a dabble? We are among the top five display companies in the world. I think in each of our products, we?re competitive in our own space.

Anandita Singh Mankotia: On the business of Android phones, do you plan to become a telecom service provider?

Telecom business globally is worth $600 billion and our revenue is $28 billion. So in the scheme of things, we?re just a small player. Google exists today because of broadband connectivity, but it has not become an Internet service provider. The same logic applies to mobiles. Let the guys who are good at mobile services do that, and we will do our job in providing application.

Sharon Fernandes: How do you look at information available with you about everyone and everything? Do you make money from it?

People choose to search because they want convenience. For example, I am carrying two credit cards for the last 20 years. My credit card companies know pretty much everything about me?my wedding anniversary, my children?s birthdays, what I like to eat, etc. Do we all use credit cards still? We do, because there is a trust at work there. I know they won?t abuse the information. They don?t. So we need to respect that trust and not misuse the information. This is the core of our business. We are one click away from competition. If we don?t respect people?s privacy, they will go to some other website. What we do is to collectively use the data to improve the experience and not use it specifically unless you sign up for specific services where you allow us to access that data and want us to personalise services for you.

Coomi Kapoor: Besides anonymity, what are the other safety measures you provide?

We have a privacy dashboard where you can go to Google and see all the information we know about you. You can choose to opt out of those things. Not many people do that. None of that data goes towards making money. We use only things as signalled by you. If you want something on corporates, we show you advertisements for corporates. If you want something on phones, we give advertisements for phones, along with advertisements on accessories, because we know you need them. We do the entire thing generically, not specifically.

Transcribed by Aveek Das and Aseem Thapliyal