big dreams could devote their full attention to tackling them, with
enough structure and resources to maximize the odds of success?
The answer it came up with is Area 120, a two-year-old in-house
incubator whose very name slyly alludes to 20% time’s limitations.
“We built a place and a process to be able to have those folks come
to us and then select what we thought were the most promising
teams, the most promising ideas, the most promising markets,”
explains managing director Alex Gawley, who has spent a decade at
Google and left his role as product manager for Google Apps (since
renamed G Suite) to spearhead this new effort. Employees “can actually leave their jobs and come to us to spend 100% of their time
pursuing something that they are particularly passionate about.
“There have been many, many kinds of corporate incubators
over the years,” Gawley acknowledges. “We wanted to do something
with a very specifc Google approach to it.” Area 120’s open call to
Googlers for ideas aims to democratize its startup-creation system
and inject it with existing know-how from all over Google—a far
cry from incubators, which get their founders externally and then
intentionally wall them off from the rest of the company.
So far, Google employees have pitched more than a thousand
projects to Gawley and his team of around 15 people, who have
green-lighted around 50 of them. Staffers accepted into the pro-
gram permanently depart their old jobs and work out of one of
Area 120’s three offce locations—San Francisco, Palo Alto, and New
York City—and receive enough fnancial support to begin turning
their brainchildren into real businesses, including the ability to
staff up with recruits from within Google or outside the company.
They run their own shows on a day-to-day basis, with consultation
from Area 120 leadership, fellow founders, and relevant experts
throughout Google. (Google doesn’t disclose how Area 120 found-
ers are compensated.)
These enterprises aren’t about open-ended research. Multiple
divisions at Google and its parent company, Alphabet, are already
devoted to that. Instead, Area 120 is looking for concepts with the
potential to pass what Google cofounder Larry Page famously called
the toothbrush test: things that become necessities, not occasional
niceties. That’s how landmark products such as Google Search,
Gmail, and Google Maps grew to billion-user scale. “You want to
build products that solve problems that people encounter daily,”
says Gawley. Over time, the goal is to launch businesses capable of
reaching Google scale—and to spin them out into the most appropriate groups within Google as they gain traction.
None of the Area 120 projects
which have become public to
date feel like they could become
the next Gmail, but each has
its own set of high aspirations.
Three years ago, Google product
manager Laura Holmes, who
joined the company in 2009, was
sitting in a meeting of the top 20
managers for a 500-person team
when she noticed that she was
the only woman in the room. “I
don’t think it was intentional,”
she says. “It’s just what happens
sometimes.” Holmes pledged to
fnd a way to help underrepresented people achieve successful careers in technology.
During a three-month sabbatical, she contemplated her
future and even interviewed
at other tech companies. But
she concluded she could make
a bigger difference by showing non-technical adults how
to code—and that Area 120
could help. Upon her return,
she sold the incubator’s leaders
on her idea for Grasshopper, a
smartphone app that teaches
users JavaScript programming
through playful quizzes, with
plenty of positive reinforcement
along the way. The app went live
Gmail | 2004
This groundbreaking
email service—with
a then implausible-sounding 1GB of
storage—began as
a one-man project
by Paul Buchheit,
Google’s 23rd
employee.
Google News | 2002
the atacks of
September 11, 2001,
prompted krishna
Bharat to create a site
for real-time news
coverage, in an
era when Google’s
search engine was
sometimes a month
out of date.
Google Earth
Outreach | 2005
when google earth
was new, Rebecca
Moore used it to fight
a plan to log redwood
trees near her home.
Her crusade became
an ongoing effort to
use Google Earth’s
mapping visualiza-
tions to “create posi-
tive change for people
and the planet.”
David Coz and
Damien Henry de-
mocratized virtual re-
ality by inventing a vr
headset made out of,
well, cardboard—with
a smartphone you
already owned pro-
viding the screen and
processing power. Diabetic Research | 2014
ai researcher lily Peng
used her 20% time
to tune Google’s
machine-vision algorithms to scan photos
of eyes for diabetic
retinopathy, which
when untreated, can
lead to blindness.
it’s now undergoing
clinical testing at eye
hospitals in india.
Ideas at Work
five google successes that began as emPloyee Passion ProJects
illustration by ADAM HAYES