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GQ on Google's Road to Riches
prostoalex writes "John Heilemann writes the untold story of Google IPO in GQ magazine (out of all tech publications out there). It's a story about Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google CEO Eric Scmidt and Silicon Valley venture capitalists that guided Google in the startup phase to take it public later. The article answers many questions that readers perhaps had about Google. Why go IPO when your earnings are just fine? How much power do Sergey and Larry have inside the company? What's the reason for so much secrecy? One interesting episode describes an engineer squatting CEO's office seeking solutide from the noise surrounding him in the cube area."
It generally helps a fast growing company to switch from private to public ownership. There are more regulatory hoops to jump through, but the business process opens up. Since Google was already keenly in the public eye, this move did indeed help the company seem more transparent.
It also gave the millions of google users a chance to profit from the company they indirectly helped to build. As the company continues to grow, so can their portfolios. Plus, making the creators of the company some cash ain't all that bad.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
"Journey to the (Revoltionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy, and Possibly Self-Destructive) Center of Google" quoth the article headline.
Revol(u)tionary? Well, the original Google was just a very slender search engine. Nothing revolutionary, just a basic idea that people liked.
Evil-Hating? If you search for "Do no evil" you get their philosophy page. As the article states, "Evil is what Sergey says is evil", and I think they know how not to piss off their users.
Cash-Crazy? They have to be cash-crazy; they're a company, and as a company making money is their only aim. Being happy and good just seem to be side-effects for Google.
The only interesting one is "Possibly self-destructive". Skimming the article, I don't think this is what they are really saying - it says that Google has become so big that Microsoft cannot cut off their air supply à la Netscape, and the only thing that could ever possibly stop them is themselves. And by the looks of things, that does not look likely to happen any time soon.
TFA is interesting, and is quite good to read if you have the time (very long) but I was not really sure what it was getting at.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
There can be multiple reasons.
- Your investors want their 10x (or whatever factor the VCs expect) money back. VCs expect a huge multiple return on their initial investment, not just their money back. Remember that only 1/10 VC-funded companies are successful; therefore, on average, a VC expects 10x from whichever company does succeed.
- Your initial employees, whose sweat went into the company in the early stages, now want a big payoff; the IPO does that.
- You want to grow your company fast and need a large chunk of cash (this was the traditional reason for IPOs). This cash can be used for acquisitions, equipment (huge data center near Portland?), etc.
The IPO is not for operating expenses, which would appear to be the thinking behind the question.---
Does MSN censor search results?
Surely, Google is entitled to some attention for entering the game late, innovating, and then succeeding. Pick up a copy of this month's Wired magazine and see how Yahoo stacks up. Certainly, Google is the darling of the computer saavy, but they still have lower viewship and less profit then the Stanford project turned internet gold. I use Google, and in fact, use many of their beta programs (which seem to stay in beta for years), but Yahoo has the "computer as a tool" market for those that don't follow the latest meme. Impressive start, yes, useful features, definitely, but Google is still not number one despite all the free publicity it gets on a daily basis.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
I imagine it has to do with three things though:
Also, there's a lot of other stuff like good health insurance, vacation time, a good work environment, etc.
They want an exit strategy. After having their money tied down in Google gor years they want to realize their nice gains and invest in new companies. Staying private would've supplied VC-s with a nice flow of cash, but that's just not their business model.
but that is just in the short term
in the long term, however, they have more constrains on decision which "might" make them "evil" since now they have to worry about market shares and stuff
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Wall street is the manic-depressive bitch public companies are married to: unlimited praise when you do right, kicks you hard when you are down, and takes cheap shots when you can't defend yourself
When you have what everyone wants, you can rewrite the rules and change the way business is built. But you still have to put on the funny hats and dance at the party according to the customs.
Jounalists always talk out of both sides of their face. The paragraph at the end is just a free open ticket for the journalist to write another article later about the failures of Google.
Nothing matters more than the right people with the right ideas and the will to execute those ideas.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
but I'd never want to leave the place, so I'd never have the need to put it down on a resume
.COM crash, it's that companies can quickly morph from a great place to be to a career killer where no self-respecting software professional would want to work.
This sort of stuff is frightening.
Google is not the second coming (if you're Christian). It's a search engine company with a very clever business plan. For all the oohing about Google's technology, their greatest impact is because of brilliant, MBA-directed market entrants, putting effort and money in a place where people didn't think money could be made.
Secondly, for all you know Google will be a terrible soul-destroying employer in just a couple of years, with a bunch of depressed, robotic employees doing whatever they can to avoid the ire of useless middle manager tin pot dictators in their endless power struggle to hide their own utter incompetence.
Large, public companies shift and ebb in an erratic multiple-personality fashion, and if you learned anything at all from the
Part of the title of this article is "Will Larry and Sergey ever grow up?" If one reads the article "growing up" according to the author of the piece means handing control of the company from the people working at the company over to people who don't work at the company, and whose main long-term interest is expropriating profit (dividends) from the wealth created by the people who work at the company. So let's impose that idea on all companies and society: immaturity is when workers have control over their own work, maturity is when control of the workers work is handed over to people concerned with expropriating dividends for themselves from said worker.
One sentence of the article says "Corporate-governance mavens pilloried the dual-share structure, which seemed starkly at odds with the populist tone of Larry's letter." Thus populism is not control of the company being in the hands of those who work at it, but being in the hands of the controlling investors. Controlling investors being a group in the US who, according to the Federal Reserve's SCF reports, is totally within the richest 1% of Americans. "Populism" is when control is in the hands of the richest 1% of Americans, who, like Paris Hilton and the Hiltons of the Hilton Hotels Corporation, do not have to work at said company, or have to work period. They just get hefty dividend checks due to what I assume would be their "maturity".
"When crisis eventually comes to Google-- and it will--the company's fate will depend on whether they have absorbed a handful of lessons that apply as much to life as they do to business: Adulthood happens. You can't make all your own rules." The tone of this whole article is numbing. Don't rock the boat. Give control over your company, your work and your life over to rich people so they can start demanding you hand over large piles of wealth you create to them. And so on and so forth. This whole thing is a depressing load of bullshit.
I do work at Google, and you're dead right. My options and bonuses add quite a nice multiplier onto my salary. Add to that how much I'm saving on (damn good) food and just plain how good it is to work there . . .
Who needs salary? I've got more important things.
Incidentally, those people saying "omg housing = $$$" are, technically, right. If you want to get a house dead-center in Palo Alto, Mountain View, or SF, you're going to be forking over crazy cash. On the other hand if you don't mind a bit of a commute you can easily get something quite a bit cheaper.
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