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I sometimes ask myself if they are looking back and questioning all the little decisions they took and think, "where did we go wrong"?

darkwater 5y ago
I think that you end up convincing yourself that you did the best, despite the obvious differences between what you were thinking back in the day and now. Also, you would make yourself think it was probably the only possible outcome and your younger self was wrong or at least very, very naïve. Or at least that's what I would do, sitting on a mountain of dollars.
leoc 5y ago
It has to be emphasised that (IIUC) Page and Brin's misbehaviour is not just a thing of the past, but active and ongoing, since they still have majority voting power over Alphabet https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-google-shareholders-goog.as https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g... . Even one of them is a hugely clouty shareholder, especially if he enlisted the support of a few of their chums who hold the remainder of Class B. Yes, by now they probably can't just undo Google's fundamental size and orientation as an AdWords behemoth at will: too many business risks and legitimate concerns about fiduciary duty, too much risk of shareholder lawsuits and so on. But within that they surely have enormous power to restrain Google's actions at their discretion. Of course when bad things happen the usual tendency is to attribute too much power and assign too much blame to a few individuals. But if anything the reverse seems to be true here. Page and Brin largely don't have the twin "if I don't do it I'll be fired" and "if I don't do it someone else will" excuses that others tend to have. Yet there seems to be an ambient belief that they shouldn't be expected to restrain Google, that their (at best) abdication of responsibility is somehow inevitable or proper. What makes this really disgraceful is that Google probably got where it today is in large part because in the past people bought, and Google actively sold, the idea that Larry and Sergey were nice guys who could be could be trusted to use their controlling stake to do the right thing. However stupid it was to ever trust in that idea, Page and Brin are not justified in abusing that trust now.

darkwater 5y ago

I think that you end up convincing yourself that you did the best, despite the obvious differences between what you were thinking back in the day and now. Also, you would make yourself think it was probably the only possible outcome and your younger self was wrong or at least very, very naïve. Or at least that's what I would do, sitting on a mountain of dollars.

leoc 5y ago

It has to be emphasised that (IIUC) Page and Brin's misbehaviour is not just a thing of the past, but active and ongoing, since they still have majority voting power over Alphabet https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-google-shareholders-goog.as https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g... . Even one of them is a hugely clouty shareholder, especially if he enlisted the support of a few of their chums who hold the remainder of Class B. Yes, by now they probably can't just undo Google's fundamental size and orientation as an AdWords behemoth at will: too many business risks and legitimate concerns about fiduciary duty, too much risk of shareholder lawsuits and so on. But within that they surely have enormous power to restrain Google's actions at their discretion. Of course when bad things happen the usual tendency is to attribute too much power and assign too much blame to a few individuals. But if anything the reverse seems to be true here. Page and Brin largely don't have the twin "if I don't do it I'll be fired" and "if I don't do it someone else will" excuses that others tend to have. Yet there seems to be an ambient belief that they shouldn't be expected to restrain Google, that their (at best) abdication of responsibility is somehow inevitable or proper. What makes this really disgraceful is that Google probably got where it today is in large part because in the past people bought, and Google actively sold, the idea that Larry and Sergey were nice guys who could be could be trusted to use their controlling stake to do the right thing. However stupid it was to ever trust in that idea, Page and Brin are not justified in abusing that trust now.