Basil Latif

“For the Chrome project, we created a sub-OKR to turbocharge JavaScript. The goal was to make applications on the web work as smoothly as downloads on a desktop. We set a moonshot goal of 10x improvement and named the project “V8,” after the high-performance car engine. We were fortunate to find a Danish programmer named Lars Bak, who’d built virtual machines for Sun Microsystems and held more than a dozen patents. Lars is one of the great artists in his field. He came to us and said, without an ounce of bravado, “I can do something that is much, much faster.” Within four months, he had JavaScript running ten times as fast as it ran on Firefox. Within two years, it was more than twenty times faster—incredible progress. (Sometimes a stretch goal is not as wildly aspirational as it may seem. As Lars later told Steven Levy in In the Plex, “We sort of underestimated what we could do.”)”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs