Google is indeed a tightly walled garden. Hackers & Founders has been holding events 4 or 5 miles away from Google headquarters in Mountain View for several years. And, out of their 25,000 employees. We only get a handful of engineers that show up. And when they arrive, they quickly realize that H&F involves having a beer or two and geeking out about startups. The Googlers often can't geek out because of heavy NDA's, and are very concerned about loose lips after having a beer or two. So, they often stop showing up.
I've also been stunned at how few Googlers I come across are working on startups part time. Those that I find are workign on something on the side are very hush-hush about it, because of non-compete stuff. (It's hard to work on a software startup that doesn't directly compete with your parent company, when your parent companies mission is to organize the world's information).
Finally, I stopped by Google Ventures this week for a "Get to know Hackers & Founders" chat, like I've had at dozens of other VC's the past few months. Google Ventures was the _only_ VC that presented me with an NDA on sign in (via kiosk). The kiosk wanted me to sign a "I will never, ever talk about what I might learn about Google inside these walls" before got a name badge or got buzzed in the door.
I walked out before my meeting with the VC. If they are that concerned about what I might learn.... I don't want to know. There's a couple hundred VC's in town that I can talk to without having to sign or decline and NDA.
So, GOOG, there's reasons you're getting the "Google is the new Evil Empire" meme attached to you.
Frankly, Microsoft has been orders of magnitude more helpful to startups at H&F than Google, and we've been meeting within spitting distance of GOOG for 3 years. The BizSpark team has been fantastic to work with, and are helpful to startups whether or not they're on the MicroSoft stack or not.
The lawyercats seem to be quite successful in keeping people from experimenting on their own time. That plus the nebulous list of product areas which might be "tainted" somehow makes it dangerous to guess.
Worse still, if you go and ask if a certain idea would be a conflict, you risk showing your hand. So, anyone who's serious about trying things is likely to leave, and it will only get worse as more business areas are roped in.
I suspect I'm one of those Googlers who used to go but stopped showing up. :-)
Anyway, I think your perception is basically accurate, at least in my limited experience. Google is the wrong place to go if you're interested in working on a startup on the side. Between the draconian "all your IP are belong to us", the intellectual demands of your day job, and the numerous opportunities to try out interesting side projects under the Google umbrella, the path of least resistance is usually just to do your side-projects as Google-owned 20% time.
It can be a good place to learn a whole bunch of technical, leadership, and product skills and then do a startup. Google's quite a bit more open internally than most big companies, so you're exposed to a lot more than you would be at another large corporation, and possibly even more than in a startup. There are specialists in performance, accessibility, internationalization, security, and all these other tricky corners that startups typically muddle through, and the quality of documentation on how to handle those is much better than you'll generally find on the web. You get daily experience with scaling, such that thinking about how to build scalable solutions becomes second-nature. You're often directly involved in product decisions, and can see how your choice fare in the real world. You have a wide variety of hard UX data at your fingertips; much of this is cutting edge applied psychology, and isn't available anywhere else.
I think we're starting to see a trickle of Xooglers leaving the mothership and founding their own things. I know at least 6 of them personally, plus there're posts like this blog entry. In general, I think this is a very good thing for the Valley startup ecosystem, just like how Fairchild spawned almost all of Silicon Valley in the 60s, and Xerox PARC spawned much of the rest of the modern computer industry in the 70s.
It's kinda ironic that Google is totally open for users, but is a walled garden for employees. Meanwhile, Facebook is a walled garden for users, but is relatively open about letting employees publish and open-source infrastructure. (Actually, that's perhaps an unfair comparison: Google is also really open about letting employees open-source infrastructure, the problem is that Google culture tends to result in re-use of core proprietary infrastructure, such that when it comes time to open-source the software, it's impossible to disentangle from the parts that definitely can't be open-sourced.) Meanwhile, Microsoft is now relatively open for both employees and users, but is a walled-garden for developers.
every single visitor has to sign into a kiosk to enter google. however, you can decline the NDA portion and it prints "nda-declined" on the name badge. this may prevent you from entering some places.
but, i do think you are over reacting about the google kiosk NDA. every visitor signs it. you are not special.
I'm not at all suggesting I'm special at all because I was asked to sign an NDA at the kiosk.
I'm suggesting that founders have a choice when it comes to investors. If I'm asked to accept or decline an NDA before I have a conversation with a VC, I'd rather go to one of the other hundred VC's to talk to in town where that isn't an issue.
a good portion of the information i have ever learned under NDA has been valuable to me in some way, so i would encourage founders to sign NDAs and get the scoop. just don't share what you learn outside your company..
There's a concrete reason you see very few Googlers working part-time with startups. Google has a conflict of interest policy that disallows employees from working on competing products; since Google has entered so many areas of technology recently, almost anybody can be considered a competitor. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of my friends leave Google recently to pursue side interests.
You can decline the NDA and nothing bad will happen. All visitors are asked to sign an NDA, which is a silly policy but easy enough to ignore.
I've also been stunned at how few Googlers I come across are working on startups part time. Those that I find are workign on something on the side are very hush-hush about it, because of non-compete stuff. (It's hard to work on a software startup that doesn't directly compete with your parent company, when your parent companies mission is to organize the world's information).
Finally, I stopped by Google Ventures this week for a "Get to know Hackers & Founders" chat, like I've had at dozens of other VC's the past few months. Google Ventures was the _only_ VC that presented me with an NDA on sign in (via kiosk). The kiosk wanted me to sign a "I will never, ever talk about what I might learn about Google inside these walls" before got a name badge or got buzzed in the door.
I walked out before my meeting with the VC. If they are that concerned about what I might learn.... I don't want to know. There's a couple hundred VC's in town that I can talk to without having to sign or decline and NDA.
So, GOOG, there's reasons you're getting the "Google is the new Evil Empire" meme attached to you.
Frankly, Microsoft has been orders of magnitude more helpful to startups at H&F than Google, and we've been meeting within spitting distance of GOOG for 3 years. The BizSpark team has been fantastic to work with, and are helpful to startups whether or not they're on the MicroSoft stack or not.