Google's team, led by Larry Page, pulled off an April Fool's prank that turned into something far more significant twenty years later.
The campaign plan was simple, it was going to be launched on the first of April 2004 and if it lasted beyond April 2nd then the people would never forget the Fool's Day joke that finally turned true.
That was how Gmail was born. A task assigned to Paul Buchheit to create.
At first, reading the story i felt this was one of the success stories of the twenty percent time rule which simply allowed employees to spend 20% of their work hours one day of a week working on projects of their choice unrelated to their regular job, this single act led to the birth of several innovations in the workplace.
However, other resources made it clear this was a task Paul carried out and this outlived the April fool joke.
Maybe aside from the ingenious moves of Paul was also launching this on April 1st.
Two key lessons for the workplace
The best entrepreneurs create an atmosphere to gives room for humans like Paul to make magic. Larry Page and Sergey Brin take the credit for creating Google and humans like Paul.
Google retains the product while Paul reminds us we could also be intrapreneurs who make all the difference in the entrepreneur space.
Paul goes ahead to create great products like Ad Sence also a Google product before moving on to co-create other amazing products for big brands like Facebook.
When launching a great product find out how to make the memories.
Stickable: Going with the April fool prank that was going to live past April 2nd was genius to those around April 1st, 2004 who remembered this prank, they would never forget it and remain, loyalists of the brand, because they possibly remember the conversations and where they were when this joke became real twenty years later.
Congrats to Google and the team that made it easy to send mail our way of life.
What were your lessons and takeaway.
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