Google's First Employee Departs

redletterdave writes "Craig Silverstein, the first employee hired by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, will leave the search giant for Khan Academy, an online education portal based in Mountain View, Calif. Silverstein had been with Google shortly after it first launched in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, a friend of both Page and Brin, in September 1998. He had helped Brin and Page develop infrastructure when Google was just a Stanford grad school project, but when he officially joined the company, Silverstein became its technology director. The Khan Academy, where Silverstein is heading next, is a not-for-profit organization that aspires to change the education industry by providing free 'world-class education to anyone anywhere.' Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is an enormous fan of the service, telling CNN that he uses it with his kids."

Comments

Re:Bill Gates has kids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape search site perhaps.

All the cool kids used Alta Vista.

Now looking for a Google replacement.

If you can tough it out for a bit... My plan is to wait a few more years (for shit to really hit the fan) and then introduce a search engine that's a simple form on a page.

It's going to be huge.

I wish I was being sarcastic. :(

Re:Bill Gates has kids?

[AliasMarlowe]

Evil compared to what? Mother Theresa and Ghandi perhaps, but compared to Facebook and the worst of the worst that is Microsoft they are still saints.

Actually, I'd class Google as a saint compared to Mother Teresa, who believed that suffering was good, and ensured it was widespread in her "hospices", and publicly stated that poverty should not be alleviated because it also was a good thing.

Re:Great run, Craig

[justforgetme]

Well, it is obvious that education at the moment is going through a very creative phase,
a lot of attention is being directed to the distributed model the KHAN academy made
popular; I'm very curious to see how the rise of distributed learning will change the
world of knowledge and accreditation. Could be that the 3k year old paradigm of the
classroom will be obsolete (or dramatically changed) by the end of the decade.

Brain drain

[laffer1]

This guy is leaving for a good cause and all, but I've noticed a pattern of Google employees leaving lately. Even newer recruits don't seem to stay long. I wonder if they've taken the fun out of working there? Obviously, something has changed. It can't be the computing problems, because they still have huge challenges.