The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three of four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.

A lot of the machines that Google is built on—commodity is the polite word for them—they're regular PCs and so they're not always the most reliable.

Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

..determination is the most important quality in a founder, open-mindedness and willingness to change your idea are key, and all startups face rejection at first.

In big companies, there's always going to be more politics and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.