The answer could be yes and no. Nevertheless, let us first investigate into the yes part of it.In order to compete with Google, you need, first of all, to have a focused, super productive world-class engineering team. As a matter of fact, only such a team or a band of dedicated engineers will be able to provide you with the right horse power to compete against such a monopolistic heavyweight competitor like Google.

World-class Engineering Team

Now, what exactly does the term ‘world-class engineering team’ mean? As it is, it is difficult to define a world-class engineer. However, the matter can be viewed from a different perspective to reach at some conclusion. For instance, we know that the top class Internet Companies of the world maintains world-class engineers in their payroll by spending millions of dollars for them annually. Therefore, to get a rough idea about the number of world-class engineers, you may add up all the software engineers that are working with, say 100 such companies. Quite an alarming figure, if you take into account the remuneration part of it. But hold your horses for a minute. Neither all software engineers carry world-class reputation, nor all top-class engineers serve top 100 Internet companies. In fact, most of them are self-employed and are rolling in monies. This is just to give you a rough idea about the immensity of the issue.

According to commercially reliable source, there are around 40,000 engineers working for top 100 Internet Companies in the world, out of which 9000 (± 2%) work for Google. Therefore, if those 40,000 constitute all of the world’s top class engineers, and Google is capable of hiring as the average top 100 Internet Companies, in that case this search giant could put around 25% on its payroll of all the world-class engineers. Likewise, if the same formula is applied to your company and you have 100 engineers, then your company could have.25% of all world-class engineers. Nevertheless, it may be said with plenty of assertion that a focused, highly productive team of 100 or even less number of world-class engineers can beat Google on its home ground.

Faster Growth Rate In an Ascendable way Needed

In order to beat Google, you also need to grow this engineering team in an ascendable way, where the growth rate will be higher than Google. If you can bring up your world-class engineering team to have 100 or more engineers, the potential benefits could be colossal – take a look at Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. for immediate proof.

Conclusion

To be honest about it, even the best private as well as the recently public software companies employs relatively small teams of focused, productive world-class engineers. However, some of them have surely figured out methods by which to grow their engineering teams in a scalable way and are also building their technical skills in an aggressive mode. If you intend to compete with Google, or raise yourself to be worth $1B+, you need to understand these dynamics and formulate your own scalable hiring plan right away.

Postscript

Probably you have now guessed why I had started with the yes part of it. As far as the No part, you may draw your own conclusion.