One of the things that makes me sad about this is that Sergei and Larry seem so checked out. They were mostly gone when I was there, but I've always gotten the feeling that Google was like grad school because Larry and Sergei wanted it that way.
I get that they've made a ton of money, but it also seems like they really wanted to spend their lives making awesome stuff and doing things like scanning books and making them free. And it feels a bit like the market forces took Google away from them. They put Sundar and a bunch of other McKinsey alums in charge. And McKinsey is, from what I can tell, basically the opposite of grad school.
Whenever I did see Larry or Sergei make an appearance they always looked a little dead inside and like they were just going through the motions.
And from what I can tell, the original sin was taking VC funding. Once they took VC funding, they had limited actual control over what happened to their company. So while they talked in 2004 about not wanting to be a conventional company, and while they warned in 1998 that ad-driven search engines were biased against their users, they still had limited ability to be unconventional in any way that was unattractive to investors. And that includes, in a sense, just being too different. A large company will eventually need to be run by professional management, and professional managers need a thing that looks and drives like a conventional company.
Google stopped needing VC money very fast, by the time I joined in 2006 it had long since been irrelevant. Google was funding the VCs by then, not the other way around.
The DoubleClick acquisition wasn't a merger, and had no impact on anything as far as I could tell. It was really acquired for the market share not the people and iirc every DoubleClick employee was reinterviewed, maybe half didn't make it!
I doubt McKinsey had much to do with it either.
IMO the problem was more that the culture of endless hiring disconnected from need eventually caught up with it. I think once Page finally became CEO he may have decided he didn't like it much, especially as with ever greater numbers of restless/bored employees the flow of negative feedback / hate mail got bigger and bigger. People like Pichai are often appointed as CEOs when founders move on, because they will stick to the founders vision and won't make any big changes. Ballmer and Tim Cook are similar, I think, except that Cook seems to have done a better job of keeping things on the original path than the other two did. Typically under such CEOs revenues and profits increase a lot, but there are few bold initiatives or risks taken. It's easy for drift to set in.
>>One of the things that makes me sad about this is that Sergei and Larry seem so checked out.
I think this one sentence describes everything, companies are all about the people at the top. Its these people that set the culture, pace and overall direction of the company.
If the founders tune out and outsource the very soul of the company to general managers, who can keep lights on rather too well. Well thats what you get. The lights will be on, it will be life as usual and gradual erosion of that very soul that was the company.
You can't blame Larry and Sergei either. There are better things to enjoy when you have billions in the bank and one life to spend it.
I don't think it's VC funding as much as being a public company, and being beholden to quarterly earnings. That's the cycle for most "revolutionary" tech companies that end up needing to keep revenue growth going each quarter.
For what it's worth, I don't think it's wrong or bad, but just the way corporations work.
The thing is it doesn't have to be that way. Well, Steve Jobs showed that it didn't have to be that way for Apple. He was able to command authority and weave a narrative that stakeholders could believe in, so bigger long-term outcomes could be pursued. Google was meant to be this kind of company too. So why did Larry and Sergey and other senior Googlers, who had the Steve Jobs example right there to follow, succumb to quarterly earnings servitude?
I get that they've made a ton of money, but it also seems like they really wanted to spend their lives making awesome stuff and doing things like scanning books and making them free. And it feels a bit like the market forces took Google away from them. They put Sundar and a bunch of other McKinsey alums in charge. And McKinsey is, from what I can tell, basically the opposite of grad school.
Whenever I did see Larry or Sergei make an appearance they always looked a little dead inside and like they were just going through the motions.
And from what I can tell, the original sin was taking VC funding. Once they took VC funding, they had limited actual control over what happened to their company. So while they talked in 2004 about not wanting to be a conventional company, and while they warned in 1998 that ad-driven search engines were biased against their users, they still had limited ability to be unconventional in any way that was unattractive to investors. And that includes, in a sense, just being too different. A large company will eventually need to be run by professional management, and professional managers need a thing that looks and drives like a conventional company.