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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 go IPO when your earnings are just fine?"
It'll be interesting to see them answer this without saying "because it made us an assload of money."
Yeah... there are days that I wish I could squat my ceo's car... in protest of... umm... not owning one?
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
why the salaries of the amazing engineers at Google aren't too high, even after the IPO.
Make your computer faster: rm -rf
"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?
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
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.
would be the correct link. :-)
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.
I googled "security", a very highly-valued keyword, on both IE and Mozilla. There is a very clear blue line between the ads and the results.
In fact, this is simply good design. The line does not over-awe the rest of the page, keeping Google's design plain, simple and highly efficient. As for the colors, webmasters are free to use CSS, to make it more apparent. A site I frequent puts Google ads in its own panel. If webmasters cannot follow clean UI designs, how is that Google's fault?
In any case, the grand-grand-parent insinuated that Google fools users, when it is in fact the users who fool themselves. Even in the BBC article, it just mentions that users can't tell the difference, but does not fault either side.
Say that fast five times in a row.
Everybody who read the WHOLE article... raise your hands...
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.
The myth of "Google Boys of Company G" continues. The GQ article manages to talk to everybody but the boys, which tells you how Page and Brin know the art of "Robert Redford PR Strategy" -- clam up and keep everyone guessing. My take is that Google's success, so far, has one fundamental basis -- the products it offers are free and, by and large, not sources of headaches, as opposed to the products of often-compared Microsoft which cost consumers money and much grief (horrible security, to name one). Google and Microsoft get roasted frequently in this space, but one notices that only the latter receives genuine wrath -- many Slashdotters are so mad at Microsoft that they simply switch to Linux or Firefox, but I bet only a few would ditch Google altogether. Eric Schmidt, the "playground supervisor" of Google, shines in this piece. I got a kick out of reading that Schmidt stopped the boys from going into low-cost space launchings and banning telephones in a new building. On the other hand, what's wrong with "Google Spaceship"?
Sun and Fun
Had you read the fine article, you would have read this:
I am sure that Larry and Sergey are smart fellas. But they don't know everything. Nobody does. John Doerr is a very smart guy and when he says something about how a business should be ran, smart people listen, I bet even Bill Gates does.
Doerr also has many stories when genius inventors completely fucked up their companies based around revolutionary inventions. Segway flopped primarily because Dean Kamen ignored everything that Doerr said. And that included Kamen's obstinate desire to micromanage everything and to prevent the CEO from doing his job. In its short history Segway has already lost 3 CEOs, two presidents and three top marketing execs!
CEOs are people who run businesses. If your company has several thousand people working for it and is worth a few billions dollars, you need a CEO, and you need to give him the authority to do things. Otherwise you will fail.
If Larry and Sergey do not grow wiser, the company will fail, PageRank or not. You can't build a business on technical ideas alone.
Note: Yes, I know that there are lame overpaid CEOs. And hiring a CEO doesn't necessarily mean changing the corporate culture.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
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.
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.