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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."
why the salaries of the amazing engineers at Google aren't too high, even after the IPO.
Make your computer faster: rm -rf
This article is nothing but a fluff piece. No new information at all, except perhaps the bit about the poached eggs at the Nasdaq launch.
And to think the entire empire was based on one simple fact: if you make the ads appear to be contextual and related to the rest of a page, a large majority of users (over 80%) will not recognize they're even looking at ads, and thus will be more likely to click.
That's the fundamental genius of Google. They've fooled most of their users. Btw if you don't believe the part about most users being unable to recognize text ads, here's the story about it from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4201343.stm
It's an excellent article, except that it always calls the Google founders "boys" - actually they are probably the mosty clever and smart founders since long.
It's interesting to read that even those smart founders had to accept an external CEO - pushed in by anxious venture capitalists. Nevertheless, it's good to see that they managed to stay in control; what is expressed as "pet CEO" in the article.
Personally, I think that firms that are lead by a small group are mostly always better managed than those who have an UberCEO. Wish that Google stays that way.
And, most of all, I wish that venture capitalists will accept that founders need to stay in control - not necessarily in the daily operations (CEO), but at least in the kind of decision group such as at Google. Unfortunately, I am not too confident about this.