Sean Mullaney

speaker

1,197 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 23 Apr

Sean Mullaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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The Entrepreneur Experiment · Why 10x Goals Are Easier Than 10% Ones: 5 Scaling Secrets from Google X & Zalando with Sean Mullaney · 23 Apr 2026 podcast

And there were just so many fires everywhere.

Google went through this phase where...

Money was literally just raining down from the sky from folks in 2011, and they just didn't have the infrastructure or the team to support it.

So when I was there, it was like this chaotic fire of the phones were ringing off the hook, and there were just not the systems in place to be able to support it.

that so you know the sales teams had a very basic crm system but it had been built um like what i love about google is so much of google's infrastructure was built as a 20 project by someone inside the company explain that to people who don't know what that 20 is

So in Google, the mentality is that they want to give people agency and autonomy to do new things and experiment.

So they had a structure which is in 20% of your work time, you can choose to build or do whatever you want, right?

And what ended up happening was like engineers would end up building stuff that was kind of cool.

Like a thousand experiments got started.

So stuff they needed to make their job better or what kind of stuff would they build?

So you could build anything.

But, you know, the folks who were obviously the most successful were building stuff that was highly relevant for Google.

For example, Gmail was a 20% project.

Really?

Yeah.

Gmail was one of the first big 20% projects that hit.

so someone created gmail and they're kind of almost side time yeah they're like you know what hey i i'd like a better email server and at the time it was like you know you want to talk about 10 times better at the time it was listen to this a gigabyte of storage which was like 10 times bigger than anything else that was on the market at the time yeah um and because google had so many servers sitting around for their index it was like we could do it like you know we could get 10 times more and that was google's big thing it was like four

Free email, 10 times the amount of storage as everyone else.

You didn't need another email service.

What you needed was an email service where you didn't run out of... You might not remember, but back in the day, if you had an email, you had to go through and delete tons of emails.

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