Starting and managing a business is no easy feat, even for Google

While it’s currently one of the most powerful and respected businesses in the world, nearly 20 years ago it was just a small group of people working at a very typical startup, all-nighters and all.

“The founders [Larry Page and Sergey Brin] built the company in the image of what they saw at Stanford graduate school,” Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and current chairman, told Reid Hoffman on Masters of Scale, a podcast series examining counterintuitive theories to growing a company. He added, “that graduate student culture, that sense that somehow we’re about to discover something new, permeated the decision-making, and traditional experience wasn’t present.”

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