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Ex-Googlers penetrating Silicon Valley startup hierarchy
- nostrademons 16y agoI think one of the biggest obstacles to the formation of a "Google mafia" on par with the PayPal mafia is that by-and-large, Googlers don't want to leave. Many of the key figures in the development of the search engine are still working on search, in high-up leadership positions. Googlers generally have a fair bit of latitude to pick their projects, so if they don't like what they're doing, they can do something else within the company instead of leaving and taking on the risk of founding a company. Contrast that to PayPal, where the whole company was bought by a big, established competitor, one that they'd roundly trounced in the marketplace beforehand. Of course a lot of the employees will leave - the culture of a place usually completely changes after an acquisition.
- joshu 16y agoThere are a LOT of ex-googles startups out there. Not a huge number of successful ones but they are around.
- PakG1 16y agoI'd be curious to know how many of those ex-Googler startups were founded by xooglers that were first-100 employees. Any "startup mafia" would seem to be made up mostly from people in that group.
- bfe 16y agoAt least one startup comes to mind to qualify under that criterion, Friendfeed (Paul Buchheit).
- joshu 16y agoNo we aren't. (I am an investor in both Weatherbill and Optimizely. Hmm.)
- jonburs 16y agoI find it a bit amusing that articles of this sort only evaluate people's most recent pre-startup employment. Sure, the Beluga folk previously were at Google. Two of the three started at Microsoft after college, however -- I worked with them both bac then. Of those two one went straight from MS to Google; the other had a more complicated path.
- tansey 16y agoThere were only a handful of Paypal founders and virtually all were extremely successful. There were 3,021 pre-IPO Google employees [1]. Seems like an unfair comparison. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google