Project Sand Hill: Seek And Acquire

Call it covert operations. Google’s Project Sand Hill is an effort to identify potential enemy resources and either acquire them before the enemy beats it to them or render the resources useless. But in the more sophisticated world of Google, those resources are termed “rocketship startups,” the enemies are the Apples and Amazons of the world and destroying good resources is … well, just a waste.

According to Wired, Google’s Suman Prasad, since 2012, has sought out startups that show potential and sucked them into Google’s world. These startups bring the technology and science required to create everything from Android phones to Google Maps.

Project Sand Hill and its goal of garnering cutting-edge innovation began with Prasad’s idea of “20 Percent Time,” where Google employees were required to spend 20 percent of their time working on what they thought would most benefit Google. Prasad is now director of startups and VC partnerships, and Project Sand Hill now serves around 100 U.S. startups and approximately 30 internationally, including some in China, India and Israel.

And overseas is where the resources are predicted to be, most likely in India and China. Technology leaders, such as Google and Apple, know that partnering with overseas entities early is the best way to leverage their innovation and technology assets.

Google Ventures is another way that Google keeps its finger on the pulse of the technology landscape, but it was not quite able to keep up with startups’ growth and the sheer number of them constantly emerging.

“The speed at which startups go from being a small startup to becoming a material company was accelerating … We wanted to partner up with companies before they came up with the next big thing,” said Prasad.

Google is responding to the startup onslaught, and the reorganization that created Alphabet was a way to both nurture internally and find external innovators. Google hopes to continue to develop well-known technologies, such as Google Maps and Android, and to acquire new technologies along the way.

Technology espionage is a necessary part of being in business in such a competitive space, and in that regard, allocating resources to it is not really rocket science. Apple has opened a similar accelerator in India to create new iOS apps.

Google’s project includes Eventbrite, My Fitness Pal and Hotel Tonight, an app for booking last-minute hotel rooms. Eleven Project Sand Hill companies have become “unicorns,” and approximately 50 percent of all of the participants have later raised an additional $7.5 billion in funding.

But what do the startups get from a partnership with Google?

Rouz Jazayeri, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, introduced My Fitness Pal to Google. According to him, My Fitness Pal had instant access to teams such as Google Fit and Google Play. Mike Lee, My Fitness Pal’s CEO, appreciated early access to new developer tools and guidance on optimizing Google ads.

It would be interesting to know how much the big tech giants spend in ensuring that their newly acquired secrets are not leaked to their competitors or that saboteurs do not infiltrate R&D efforts.