Today is the first day Larry Page is once again the CEO of Google. (Eric Schmidt announced he would be relinquishing his CEO post in January). The last time Page was the CEO was a decade ago before he and co-founder Sergey Brin hired Schmidt for adult supervision. The founders don’t need supervision anymore, and while Google is still the most powerful tech company in the world, it is not as invincible as it once seemed even a few years ago.
Google is still king of search, but when it comes to new growth areas like social or local, the action is elsewhere: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon. Maybe what it needs is the return of a founder CEO. Between the two over-achieving Google co-founders, Page is considered to be the ambitious one.
Consider this anecdote from Steven Levy’s soon-to-be-released book, In The Plex, which I was reading last night. The book describes the first time Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr met Page and Brin in 1999:
The meeting was just ending when Doerr asked a final question: “How big do you think this can be?”
“Ten billion,” said Larry Page.
Doerr just about fell off his chair. Surely, he replied to Page, you can’t be expecting a market cap of $10 billion. Doerr had already made a silent calculation that Google’s optimal market cap—the eventual value of the company—could go maybe as high as one billion dolars. “Oh, I’m very serious, said Page. “And I don’t mean market cap, I mean revenues.”
Remember, back in 1999, Google didn’t even have any revenues to speak of and hardly any idea how it would make money. (AdWords and AdSense would come later). But Page is, if anything, an outside-the-box thinker.
Doer would go on to invest in Google and become a board member. The company surpassed even Page’s wild projection. Last year, Google’s revenues approached $30 billion, and it’s market cap today stands at $188 billion. But can Page inject new life into the company and keep it growing for another ten years?
Of course, today, if you follow Doerr , he is investing in Twitter, Groupon, and Zynga.
Larry Page was Google’s founding CEO and grew the company to more than 200 employees and profitability before moving into his role as president of products in April 2001. He continues to share responsibility for Google’s day-to-day operations with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin. The son of Michigan State University computer science professor Dr. Carl Victor Page, Larry’s love of computers began at age six. While following in his father’s footsteps in academics, he became an honors graduate from the...
John Doerr is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Together with KPCB’s partners, John has backed many of America’s best entrepreneurial leaders, including: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt: Google [GOOG] Jeff Bezos: Amazon [AMZN] Scott Cook, Bill Campbell: Intuit [INTU] Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla: Sun [SUNW] And the founders of Compaq, Cypress, Macromedia and Symantec These ventures have created more than 150,000 new jobs. In 1974 John joined a small chipmaker, Intel,...
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