Half & Half — by Dan Lynn

By Dan Lynn

Back in 2003, I was on a flight, sitting next to a woman I'd never met. We started a conversation and she asked me what I did.

I told her I owned a digital marketing technology company that automated the bid management process for search marketing.

"Oh," she said, "my friend is involved with search marketing."

"Really? Where does he work?"

"Google."

"What does he do for them?"

"He's the CEO. Would you like to meet him?"

She arranged the meeting. A week later, Scott Delea — the President of DigitalGrit — and I flew out to California from New Jersey to meet Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. This was before Google even went public.

More than twenty years later, I remember three things about that meeting.

First, how generous Eric was with his time. He was running the hottest company in technology, and he didn't act like a man with somewhere better to be.

Second, how genuinely interested he was in what we were doing at DigitalGrit. He asked questions and he listened.

And third, he said something I've never forgotten: "Half of Google is focused on providing the best possible search results — anticipating what the user is searching for. The other half is focused on monetizing that."

Half and half.

If you've read my Key Learning called "Buckets," you know that breaking problems down into bite-sized pieces is something of a superpower of mine. Most people get lost in the complication of things. But at the end of the day, business is all about creating the greatest possible value — and then monetizing it. That's it. Two buckets.

What I loved about Eric's answer was that Google didn't just understand those two buckets — they organized the entire company around them. Half the people focused on one, half on the other. No drift, no confusion about what mattered.

I've used that key learning many times throughout my career. Whenever I look at a business — my own or anyone else's — I ask the same question: where is the energy actually going? Is half of it creating real value, and half of it capturing that value? If it's badly out of balance, something eventually breaks. And if you think about it, that way of thinking works for every business.

One more thing that experience taught me: none of it happens if a stranger on a plane doesn't ask a question, and a busy CEO doesn't make time for two guys from New Jersey. The most impressive people I've met are generous with their time and curious about yours. That's not a coincidence.