Martin Gonzalez is the co-creator of Google’s Effective Founders Project, a global research program that decodes the factors enabling startup founders to succeed. He also works closely with Google’s engineering and research leaders on organization design, leadership, and cultural challenges. Martin has advised leaders across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He teaches and collaborates on research at the world’s elite universities for engineering and business, including Stanford, Wharton, and INSEAD. He holds two master’s degrees in organizational psychology and behavioral science from Columbia University and the London Business School. Prior to Google, he was a product manager at Johnson & Johnson and a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. His book, “The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Problems Startups Face” (coauthored with Josh Yellin), became an instant national bestseller when it launched in the US last May. It hit #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list and has been identified as one of the best new management books of 2024 by Thinkers50, which the Financial Times calls the “Oscars of management thinking.”
In this part two interview with Martin Gonzalez, we explore the author’s journey and the integration of practical and academic endeavors in achieving rapid career success.
Q8: In your journey from product management and strategy consulting to leading organizational development at Google and engaging in academic research, how has your approach to leadership evolved?
A8: Business leaders today face a dilemma similar to one that troubled the medical field decades ago. There was a widespread belief that each patient’s situation was so unique that well-established evidence and standard protocols were often ignored (by some estimates only 15% of clinical decisions were based on evidence). If that’s shocking to you, you’re not alone. After all, what else other than evidence should guide medical decisions?
Instead, doctors relied on outdated knowledge from their time in med school, untested traditions passed down through generations of practitioners, anecdotes from treatments lacking the rigor of controlled studies, and, most alarmingly, information from pharmaceutical companies pushing their products and services with commercial interests that are many times at odds with the highest standards of patient care.
I’ve come to appreciate the value of using data and evidence to guide all people decisions. I discovered the wealth of rigorous, scholarly work on management and the importance of using the scientific method to guide how we lead organizations. Yes, unlike medical practice, management practice is not a matter of life or death. But given the substantial time we spend at work and the psychological pain bad bosses can inflict on people, I’ve developed a conviction that evidence-based management is a critical evolution to how we should lead organizations.
So many practices today are based on junk science or are pushed by self-proclaimed “leadership gurus.” Some examples: most personality tests (e.g., MBTI, Enneagram), sales methods with “neuro-” in their name, generational stereotypes in the workplace, and the overemphasis on “building trust” as a fix-all solution.
When there is evidence, I lean on it. When there is none yet, I take a scientist’s eye at a challenge and see how we can turn it into an opportunity to do research.
Q9: Your career includes work at Google, authoring “The Bonfire Moment,” and teaching and research at Stanford University, Wharton, and INSEAD. What unifies these diverse pursuits, and how do you manage to balance them all effectively?
A9: What ties it all together is the conviction that maverick innovators will build the technologies that solve the big challenges of our generation, and that the biggest risk to their success is typically people-related. A classic study from Harvard showed that 65% of startups fail not because of bad technology, poor market timing, or running out of cash, but because of people problems.
Peter Senge, a former MIT professor, said: “The collective intelligence of a leadership team is often lower than the average intelligence of its members.” This aligns with my experience working with leadership teams across the world—having A players doesn’t guarantee an A team. My work revolves around the many problems of organizing and scaling technology companies. I help maverick innovators anticipate and solve the people problems that often derail the most promising ventures, whether in the pockets of intense innovation at Google, at ambitious startups, or with students at elite training grounds for technology and business like Stanford, Wharton, and INSEAD.
I manage my portfolio career by sticking to three general rules. First, I stay focused on the core goal of “helping maverick innovators solve their toughest people problems,” and any opportunity that falls outside of that—no matter how exciting—falls off the priority list. As a result, all my different activities feed into each other. My work with startups enriches my work with Google leaders, who are often trying to build nimble, innovative internal startups; the scaling challenges at Google are things I help startups anticipate, and all of this helps me bring management ideas to life in the classroom and makes me valuable to my academic collaborators.
The second rule is that I am very selective about the collaborators I work with. Collaborators need to give me energy (not drain it), serve as intellectual sparring partners who push and challenge me, and share the same passion and deep interest in the field.
The final rule is that I’m very disciplined about my sleep and time. I average 7 hours of sleep per night, and I start most days before everyone else, typically getting out of bed between 4 and 4:30 a.m. My best thinking happens between 4:30 and 6:30 a.m. I’m ruthless about not wasting time in poorly facilitated meetings, social gatherings whose sole purpose is to “keep up with the Joneses,” or idleness due to a poorly planned day. I visualize all the 5- and 10-minute scraps of time throughout the day and think that if I had planned better, I would have gotten much more done. I’m not a fan of cutting up a day into 30- or 60-minute chunks running from meeting to meeting. I try to preserve 2-3 hour blocks about twice a week to do deep work (outside of my early morning routine). It isn’t easy and takes saying no and being willing to disappoint a few people.
Q10: Beyond your practical work, you invest in academic research, such as creating Google’s Effective Founders Project and collaborating with researchers at Wharton and Stanford. Can you share more about your current and future research projects?
A10: I have two research streams that take up my time and intellectual energy. The first delves into the psychology of startup teams. I’m working to uncover the success factors of the best startups on a global scale, much of which is captured in our book. Currently, I’m collaborating with Wharton’s Valentina Assenova to understand the economic benefits for founders who take their leadership role seriously as their company grows. Another study, with Stanford’s Andrea Geissinger, focuses on “founder trauma,” examining the conditions under which founders replicate (or overcorrect) the trauma in the organizations they build.
The second research stream explores the impact of transformative technology on organizations. We’re collaborating with Stanford’s Melissa Valentine on how generative AI might change the role of managers in organizations. I’ve been considering the organizational risks when AI tools create selective upgrades across the workforce, leading some to over-rely on generative AI and unknowingly hurt their performance. There is mounting evidence of the frontier capabilities of these models, showing, for instance, that strong-performing entrepreneurs relying on AI advisors perform even better, while weak performers do even worse. Other studies reveal that individual creativity improves significantly, but collective creativity suffers. I’ve also been examining how increasing levels of self-sufficiency, thanks to these tools, might not necessarily be good for teams.
Q11: You’ve achieved remarkable success in your career, reaching incredible heights in just 15 years since transitioning into your current field—accomplishing in half the time what many hope to achieve in decades. What do you believe has been the key to your rapid success?
A11: When I consider what still needs to be done to tackle the issues I care deeply about, I feel a sense of distance. Victory and success seem far off. But I recognize that I have much to take stock of. Here’s the mental model that has shaped my career and life:
1. Do hard things that matter: Choose challenging and meaningful tasks because fewer people will crowd out that space. Also, I’ve learned the very best talent is driven by difficult, meaningful problems, not by easy, commonplace goals. So when you start building your team, you’ll have a better set of people to choose from.
2. What big problem in this world do you want to help solve? This question has guided all my career decisions. A deep commitment to solving a problem that feels personal will sustain you through tough days. On the days where the average person will quit for easier goals. So in my career, I’ve turned down jobs that offered more money, fancier titles, or better work-life balance. The happy irony of this approach is that my focus and dedication have led to building deep expertise that the world is willing to pay for, bringing financial and status rewards as a bonus.
3. Surround yourself with brilliant people: You are only as good as the company you keep. Seek out individuals you admire, who are better than you, and find ways to be in their orbit. I believe in “playing long-term games with long-term people.”
4. Take care of your inner life: Maintain healthy lifestyle habits. Make time for reflection and journaling. Invest in friendships that keep you grounded and provide positive energy. Find purpose and meaning in your work.
5. Be aware of your privilege and lift others as you climb:Recognize that much of what you have is given, and never believe that your success is solely your doing. So I’ve carved out time to helping others on their journey, whether its through my teaching, or accepting requests for career chats sometimes by complete strangers.
This approach has shaped my path and allowed me to achieve more than I initially thought possible.
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Josiah Go is the chair and chief innovation strategist of Mansmith and Fielders Inc., and the co-founder of Mansmith Innovation (www.mansmithinnovation.com)
This article is the second part of a series. Be sure to read Part 1: Q&A with Martin Gonzalez on Startup Success for a complete understanding of the topic.
