Google for Entrepreneurs

Objective

To grow communities of entrepreneurs and start-ups and equip them with skills and resources to pursue their ideas.

Overview and Main Activities

The initiative supports over 70 projects in 125 countries. Selected projects include:

• Google Campus: Community hubs where entrepreneurs come to learn, share ideas and launch start-ups. Campuses are currently live in London and Tel Aviv. Madrid, Sao Paulo, Seoul and Warsaw Campuses are scheduled to launch in 2015. Campuses partner with specialist corporate partners, universities and successful entrepreneurs. The London Campus, for example, works with Seedcamp, TechHub, Central Working, Startup Weekend (see below) and other organizations to provide entrepreneurs and start-ups with support at various stages of their business. Google employees provide one-on-one mentoring on a variety of topics, from legal issues to mobile design. The free speaker series offers thought leaders and workshops on various topics to educate early-stage entrepreneurs on all aspects of starting and growing businesses – including business skills, design marketing, law, finance and technology. Last year at London Campus, employees mentored 1,100 start-ups and supported over 1,000 events.
• Lemonade Day: A free, experiential learning programme that teaches childrem basic economic literacy and business skills, and provides them with hands-on experience on how to start, own and operate their own business – a lemonade stand. Participants receive step-by-step lessons and are supported by staff who guide them through the planning, budgeting, investment, procurement, marketing and selling process of lemonade. Online versions of the curriculum are also available so that children everywhere can learn about entrepreneurship.
• Startup Weekend: The non-profit Startup Weekend helps participants become entrepreneurs and start their own business. All Startup Weekend events follow the same model. On Friday, attendees pitch their start-up idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas, which are determined by popular vote. Over Saturday and Sunday, teams focus on business model creation, coding designing and market validation, practicing LEAN start-up methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demonstrate their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts. On average, half of Startup Weekend’s attendees have technical or design backgrounds; the other half have business backgrounds.

Success Factors and Challenges

Most critical success factors:

• Google’s entrepreneurial culture – technical experts, an understanding of what makes entrepreneurial communities thrive, and financial support to help partners grow
• Local community of entrepreneurs with a wide audience
• Partnerships with technology leaders

Main challenges:

• Getting to scale globally while maximizing local impact

Recommendations for Others

A data and customer driven approach to designing programmes and projects – versus a silo approach – ensures programmes have demand and fill a market gap. Therefore, it is important to start every project with customer research, data and interviews before taking action.

Replicability and Scalability

How easily could other organizations implement this initiative?
Easy: The diversity of programmes means some of them are fairly simple to adopt. For example, it is easy to get young employees to mentor start-ups.

How easily can this initiative be expanded to include a larger number of participants?
Difficult

About the Organization

Website: www.google.com
Sector: Information Technology
Size (number of employees): 50,000 – 100,000
Headquarters: Mountain View, United States