Measure what matters

The Ping-Pong Table

In the fall of 1999, John Doerr walked into a two-story L-shaped building off the 101 freeway in Mountain View and tried to teach two twenty-six-year-olds how to run a company. He had just put eleven point eight million dollars into Google in exchange for twelve percent of the business — the largest check of his career — and he was, by his own admission, slightly terrified. Larry Page had told him the revenue target. Not the market cap. The revenue. Ten billion dollars. That was a number that lived in the province of Microsoft and Intel and IBM, and Page had said it the way someone else might say "we should get lunch."

There was no boardroom. The pitch happened around a ping-pong table that doubled as the conference table, with beanbag chairs scattered around it. Larry was there. Sergey was there. So were Marissa Mayer and Susan Wojcicki and Salar Kamangar and about thirty other people who would later become some of the most consequential operators in the history of technology. Doerr put a slide up on a plastic overhead projector — the kind teachers used in middle schools — and he laid out a system he had learned twenty-four years earlier as a summer intern at Intel, working for a Hungarian refugee named Andy Grove.

The system had two parts. An Objective was what you wanted to achieve. A Key Result was how you would know you had achieved it. Objectives were qualitative and inspiring. Key Results were numbers, dates, deliverables. As Marissa Mayer would put it, with the bluntness that became her signature, it was not a Key Result unless it had a number. There was no gray area. At the end of the quarter you either hit the number or you did not, and the system was designed to make that fact impossible to hide.