None of the Area 120 projects that have become public to date feel like they Balenciaga Speed Trainer Femme could become the next Gmail, but each has its own set of high aspirations. Three years ago, Google product manager Laura Holmes, who joined the company in 2009, Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 34 Womens was sitting in a meeting of the top 20 managers for a 500-person team when she noticed that she was the only woman in the Nike Air VaporMax Femme room. “I don’t think it was intentional,” she says. “It’s just what Adidas Superstar Femme happens sometimes.” Holmes pledged to find a way to help underrepresented people achieve successful careers in technology.During a three-month sabbatical, she contemplated her future and even interviewed Nike Air Vapormax Femme at other tech companies. But she concluded she could make a bigger difference by showing non-technical adults how to code–and that Area 120 Nike Air Presto Femme could help. Upon her return, she sold the incubator’s leaders on her idea for Grasshopper, a smartphone app that teaches users JavaScript programming through playful quizzes, with plenty of positive reinforcement along the way. The app went live in April in Google’s and Apple’s stores, where it’s racked up more than 20,000 ratings from users across both platforms and maintained a five-star average.

For Google, incubating Grasshopper Nike Air Max 270 Femme is about loftier goals than short-term profit potential, though not entirely selfless ones. “The more people who know how to Adidas ZX Flux Femme code, the more people can leverage Google products and resources, and that expands the digital ecosystem,” explains Holmes. With that in mind, Gawley’s management team has encouraged her to concentrate on building Grasshopper’s audience rather than worry too much about how to turn a profit. Adidas NMD Femme Just a handful of staffers are currently dedicated to the project. “It’s not like we have Google-size budgets to work with,” Holmes says. “We’re trying to be lean, trying to be scrappy, feeling that pressure to deliver.”Area 120 founders may need to scrimp, but running even a tiny startup provides Nike Epic React Flyknit Femme an education that might be tough to get anywhere else at Google. Along with four fellow Googlers, Bickey Russell joined Area 120 to found Kormo, a job-hunting app tailored to the needs of emerging markets, where many work opportunities are so informal and Nike Air Vapormax Womens short-term that they never turn into a conventional job listing; it launched in Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka in September. Previously, www.andrewjoslin.co.uk Russell had worked his way up to a leadership position in Google’s sales operations, and though he’d always considered himself entrepreneurial, he still Adidas Sobakov Femme lived within a siloed world.

Once Kormo got the go-ahead, “trying to build a team of engineers and product managers and designers was very new to me,” says Russell, who was in Dhaka when I talked to him via videoconference but normally operates from Area 120’s Palo Alto quarters.Don’t Adidas ZX Flux Mujer feel too sad for Lee, though. She’s now one of a reported 100-plus Googlers at work on Fuchsia, the company’s radical, secretive Nike Air Max 2017 Mujer effort to write a new operating system from scratch. The time she spent on her short-lived startup, she says, imbued her with “a hustle Nike Air Max 95 Femme mentality–you build and learn and iterate and figure things out.” If Area 120’s value to Google ends up being as much about the lessons it teaches Balenciaga Speed Trainer Womens as the products it creates, even its failures may count as successes.