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Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Alberto Savoia (Google) - Build the Right It [ETL Looks Back]

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Revisit timeless insights from Alberto Savoia, Google’s first engineering director and the driving force behind the launch of AdWords, in this re-released 2019 ETL episode. As the creator of “pretotyping” and author of The Right It, Savoia tackles one of innovation’s greatest challenges: ensuring you’re building a product the market truly wants. With 80% of innovations failing—even when executed competently—Savoia reframes success as not only building it right, but first building the right “it.” This episode offers powerful strategies for entrepreneurs, product managers, and innovators looking to test ideas quickly and minimize risk in today’s rapidly changing business landscape.


The episode first aired on March 13, 2019


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Who you are defines how you build.

0:05.0

This is the Entrepreneurals Thought Leader series.

0:09.0

Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.

0:13.0

On this episode, we have Alberto Savoya, Innovation Agitator Emeritus at Google.

0:21.6

Alberto helped develop, manage, and launch products such as Sun Microsystems workstations,

0:26.6

Sun Labs Java, and Google AdWords.

0:29.2

He also developed the rapid prototyping technique called predotyping.

0:33.2

Here's Alberto.

0:41.3

This is my battle try these days. Failure bites bite back.

0:43.3

I'm a serial entrepreneur and I kind of got my butt kicked a few times and the last time

0:49.6

I decided I don't want this to ever happen again to me or anyone else.

0:53.6

So my mission is to help entrepreneurs, most of you here,

0:58.2

to teach you how to fight failure and win consistently.

1:02.2

But first, let me tell you, I'm going to structure it very simply,

1:06.1

seven strategies in 35 minutes.

1:08.5

I don't have a lot of time.

1:09.7

But fortunately, there is a book that you can buy

1:11.3

out there that, you know, you can spend six hours in my company. And I was told, give you, give the

1:17.1

advice you would give to your 20-year-old self. So a lot of 20-year-old here, but regardless,

1:21.6

this advice is timeless. So whether you're 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, this entrepreneurial advice

1:26.9

is applicable.

1:30.3

Now, my entrepreneurial journey, as you can tell from my accent, I was not born here.

...

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