The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) · Saturday, July 4, 2026
Clay Bavor identified two key takeaways from his 18 years at Google: a willingness to invest deeply in the technology stack to build products and the importance of exceptional people. He highlighted Google's practice of building its own infrastructure and the value of managers who bet on employees, giving them more responsibility than they might initially deserve.
“Things that I've definitely brought with me. Number one is a willingness to invest as far down the technology stack as you need in order to build the service and product that you want.”
“Google, I think from the early days, famously built its own, if not data centers, cluster architectures, its own novel distributed systems for serving and data storage and so on.”
“The people were so extraordinary to work with, and I had a series of managers and leaders that I got to work with who took bets on me, gave me on paper at least more responsibility than I deserved and got to work on just truly fascinating things.”