Start-Ups: How To Avoid Ruining The Startup You Just Bought, From A Google - YouTube Engineer (Forbes)

Start-Ups: How To Avoid Ruining The Startup You Just Bought, From A Google - YouTube Engineer (Forbes) - Billy Biggs

Billy Biggs is an engineer’s engineer, someone who writes video, music, and Internet telephony software for fun when he’s not on his day job as principal architect for YouTube’s computer systems and software. His day job is pretty cool, too: He’s credited with helping Google GOOG -1.94%‘s video site YouTube attract 6 billion hours of video a month viewed by more than a billion people.

One of the rising stars I profiled in Forbes’ third annual list of the world’s most innovative companies, Biggs talked at some length about his and YouTube’s approach to product development, in particular developing engineering systems. It struck me that his method of fostering innovation is increasingly relevant today, when big companies spend big money for startups. Think Facebook FB -4.11%-Instagram, Google-Waze, and Yahoo YHOO -2.54%-Tumblr, to name just a few recent examples.

The problem with relatively big acquisitions like this is that they still often get lost inside the acquiring company, whose managers then proceed to do everything they can to stifle them. Pretty soon, it’s all about goodwill writedowns, fleeing founders, and press pile-ons. Right, Yahoo? Google?Microsoft MSFT -2.61%?

Facebook and Yahoo may not say it publicly, but it’s a good bet that Google’s handling of YouTube after its 2006 acquisition–allowing it to operate separately in a location 30 miles from headquarters and even letting it maintain some measure of its own culture–is a model for the more recent acquisitions. Since YouTube is now widely acknowledged as a successful acquisition for Google, Facebook and Yahoo (and so far, Google itself with Waze) have maintained, to varying degrees, autonomy for their new units. YouTube’s approach to product development may provide a guide to how these companies and others can at least try to avoid stifling its expensive acquisitions while also imparting the experience and scale that can help them flower.

Biggs had a unique perspective as the first Google engineer to move over to YouTube after the acquisition. So he could compare the tactics employed by a startup vs. the tactics employed by a large company. “I was on Google Video just long enough to feel that I was desperately trying to compete with startups effectively,” he says. Google had a lot of parallel computer systems it was applying to video, while YouTube had systems that were “scrappier and simpler but still worked.”

One lesson he learned is that it’s not always best to focus just one team on a particular problem, even if that appears to be the most economically efficient. “I think there is something to be learned from getting multiple perspectives,” he says. “You don’t want to cut yourself off from seeing multiple perspectives. You can learn a lot from doing the same thing two different ways and then picking the best one.”

What’s more, he says, “different people sometimes see different things as being the hard problem. Sometimes you can spend a lot of time obsessing about what is the hard problem, and solve it, whereas someone with another perspective might not see that as the hard one.” So putting more than one team on a particular project can help work past these problems more quickly.

Playing the YouTube Way and the Google Way against each other to find the better way to solve a problem. “You try it the YouTube way and test the hypothesis,” he says. “That’s one of the ways you build innovative products–by encouraging diversity in a controlled manner that allows you to learn from it. You want to compare and contrast two things and pick the one that’s better.”

Another lesson was that simplicity nearly always works best, even for really large-scale systems that seem as if they need to be fiendishly complex. “Simple things work really well,” he says. “Sometimes when people talk about building something at scale it means something complicated. Usually it means building something simple where there’s fewer moving pieces because then it’s cheaper to run at really high volume. Finding a simple solution to something is actually rather challenging.” Indeed, he says, Google learned a lot from YouTube, which he says had built “conceptually fairly simple systems.”

Not least, he says, it pays to try to maintain the scrappy culture of many startups. “We have kept enough of the startup culture to ensure that on the engineering side, we’re able to encourage doing things rough and quick more than slow and steady,” he says. “Some of that naturally changes as you get bigger. But it’s certainly still a good part of the engineering culture.”

Category: Forbes, Robert Hof, Startup, Startups, Youtube