I have had few conversations with Google employees recently.
And got to know that Google is not doing as great as we think it is from outside.
And when it comes to the two founder. Lary Page is someone I am more interested in.
He’s not as rich as people think. The bulk of his value is in special class A voting shares (GOOGL).
He and Sergey together own the majority of Google voting rights.
Although they are ultra rich on paper, if they ever tried to realize a substantial amount of that wealth, they would lose control of Google.
And the stock price would plummet. And Google would not be the same with greedy corporate interests on the board.
This is what concerns me with Elizabeth Warren’s campaign.
She would force Larry to sell 3% of his ownership each year.
Whether the stock and voting rights are transferred to the government or to the highest bidder, the control of the company would be diffused.
In such an environment, Larry and Sergey could never have founded an innovative company like Google. They would have had to have given up way too much control to random outside investors.
Larry Page has pushed Google past IPO, which happened on 8/19/2004.
Eventually when he’ll decide to retire. It may be sooner than we think, but quite likely not.
What will happen to his shares is up to Google’s corporate bylaws, or normal stock sales if not addressed.
I don’t know off hand if there are any special provisions which would prevent Page from selling off his stake. Google could also fall, which while not super likely, is definitely possible.
Nothing lasts forever, not even the British Empire.
But if you think it through.
Larry Page (and friends) already sold Google.
Google is a public company. I own a little bit of it. Maybe you own a bit of it too.
Larry owns a fairly large chunk though. He holds special stock that entitles him to many more votes than ordinary stockholders have, and that allows him together with Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt to have control of the company’s board.
He may be selling parts of it once in a while, but he probably won’t sell much in order to retain this control.
So again going back to our question will he sell Google?
I doubt it, when Larry became CEO he setup a system where all new shares that went to employees/acquisitions would be non-voting, to preserve Larry and Sergey 51% control of the company.
I don’t see him ever giving up that control, just for a chunk cash which he has ample amounts of already.
Why bother? And they could always use their majority to give themselves money, like setup a dividend on the special Class B super voting shares they own.
I’m sure Larry Page really needs to take advice from some no-name former director at Facebook and/or the rest of us, but I have to say, the possibility that someone important might be reading your opinion online is a part of its secret thrill.
All right then, here you go:
- Fire a lot of extra executive and management staff they do not need.
- Refocus on their amazing problem-solving products, not features.
- Do not indulge in social media trap
What happens if Larry Page and Sergey Brin decide to shut down Google? No Google any more.
We all know there are 100s of product from Google, started and then shutdown after a while. One of the best examples is Google+.
Do you think Google search will shut at some point?
First and foremost this will never happen because if you are making billions then why you shut your business.
And if they do this then
- We have to find better search engine that gives better results.
- We need to switch to another mail service, which is impossible for me :(
- We will lose drive facilities which will automatically sync and accessible from anywhere.
- Not only that, but we lose huge resource of gaming and apps which is play store.
- Many small companies will shut down who makes android enabled smartphones at cheaper rate.
- Many peoples are making money by posting videos on YouTube, publishing their apps on play store, posting their business ads will be no more.
Whose brainchild was Google, Larry Page’s or Sergey Brin’s?
It was a joint effort.
According to their Wikipedia articles, Brin produced the data mining system that scans web pages, and Page produced the algorithm that uses that information to rank the pages (named PageRank — the “Page” coming from his name, not from the idea of web “pages”).
The original search engine wouldn’t have worked had either one of those components been missing.
Of course, as well as building a great product, it takes substantial business acumen (or perhaps just a lot of good luck) to go from there to the massive corporation Google is today.
To some extent that’s an accident — they initially tried to sell their product to the Excite search engine as developing Google was distracting them from their academic work.
It’s only because Excite refused to buy it that Google continued and developed as a stand-alone entity.
Did Larry Page write any code at Google?
According to the book- I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, Page and Brin actually had little to do with making the code that powered Google back then.
Early Google engineering boss Craig Silverstein says, “I didn’t trust Larry and Sergey as coders. I had to deal with their legacy code from the Stanford days, and it had a lot of problems.
They’re research coders: more interested in writing code that works than code that’s maintainable.”
None of Larry’s original code is in the current codebase. But obviously, there would be no Google without his original, poorly optimised, “lousy” code :P
What does Larry Page need to do to bring Google back to its startup roots?
To me, it’s all just rhetoric. It’s virtually impossible to effectively bring a big company ‘back to its roots’ in the sense that one would cut red tape and go from corporate-environment to startup-environment.
Why? Well, because there’s a reason that the environment changed in the transition from start-up to corporate.
Now, one can always (literally, always) cut red tape, slim down the organization and focus on going lean.
But does that make the company more agile, more ‘start-up-ish’ again?
I’d argue: No
It cuts costs, but it rarely makes the company any more agile.
See, a big company need a big organization. A start-up usually has few products, few employees, and overall very little actual management.
There’s one or a few leaders that manage the others, that drive the product vision and such, but that’s not really because they’re a start-up but because they are a small company that happens to be a start-up.
As the company grows, so does the need to manage it, and managing thousands of employees working on hundreds of products (as is the case with Google) the same way you manage a small company is not a success formula.
Sure, Apple does this with some success, don’t get me wrong, Apple’s success is massive, but how much of that is related to their management and how much to their products?
But Apple isn’t Google. Google has a huge amount of employees and products, whereas Apple has a single-product focus.
Sure, there may be variations of the MacBook, but it’s still the MacBook.
So, logically, the only way Google could get back to its start-up roots, whatever that truly means, is by reducing their scope proportionately.
Thus, if they want to have a number of operating systems, hundreds of sites and services and tens of thousands of employees, they’ll be corporate.
They can be a great corporation, but they can’t combine that with being a start-up in any meaningful sense of the word.
