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."

Comments

IPO

[eserteric]

"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."

I've always wondered

[nsasch]

why the salaries of the amazing engineers at Google aren't too high, even after the IPO.

Re:I've always wondered

[igrp]

Well, I don't work at Google and, frankly, have no idea what they pay their engineers so I can only speculate.

I imagine it has to do with three things though:

• Options. I remember reading an article during the bubble about millionaire secretaries at Microsoft. Basically, they choose stock options over Christmas bonuses. So, those stock options might actually be worth a lot more than their salaries.
• Benefits. The folks at Google pride themselves in making work indistinguishable from fun. Work is play. And if you really think about it: would you rather make $95k a year and wake up every single morning to go to a job you hate or make $75k (again, I have no idea how much Google pays their engineers) and do something you really enjoy. Personally, I'd rather have fun and enjoy my life, even if it means making less money.

  Also, there's a lot of other stuff like good health insurance, vacation time, a good work environment, etc.

• Location. IIRC, the salary you get at Google isn't just based on what you do and how well you do it, but also on where you do it. Remember the story about the Google facility they were building in rural OR. $70k in the Pacific NW goes a long way - at least compared to $70k in South Cali.

Why IPO?

[Quixote]

Why go IPO when your earnings are just fine?

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.

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Does MSN censor search results?

liked fuckedgoogle.com says- "assloads of money"

[googisgod]

http://www.fuckedgoogle..com/

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

Google phenomenon

[shrapnull]

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.

It's all about the VC firms

[jomagam]

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.

Not just a fluff piece

[GaryOlson]

This article exemplifies a few life lessons all engineers should heed:

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.