Fast Company - Dec18Jan19

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.