…In April 2007, when the trio informed Google they were leaving, they didn’t give any specifics, just that they were going to do their own thing. Without even knowing what their idea was, Google wanted them - and their project - to stay. “They told us, ‘Here’s a blank check,’” recalls Knapp, a baby-faced former track star at Stanford. “I said, ‘You’re asking me to be a surrogate parent.’” Knapp and his pals would do the hard work, in other words, but Google would own the product. Instead, off they went, leaving behind the perks, the 20% time, and a combined seven-figure pile of unvested options. (Google declined to comment on Knapp’s account.)
A year later the company the three founded, Ooyala, is precisely the kind of budding success Google wants to be creating inside its walls. Ooyala’s 28 employees are building a system that runs videos for independent Web sites, and eventually they plan to sell video ads in the same way Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) hawks text ads for other web publishers. The startup has raised $10 million in venture capital, which doesn’t even come close to matching Google’s resources. But the Ooyala founders say what they lack in institutional backing they make up for in speed and the ability to communicate with one another by turning around in their chairs and talking. Google was like that too, about eight years and 18,000 employees ago.
It would be easy to dismiss the exodus of some of Google’s best people if it were an isolated occurrence. It isn’t. Paul Buchheit, an early Google engineer who coined the “Don’t be evil!” battle cry, is a founder, with three ex-Google colleagues, of a social-networking company called FriendFeed. Yanda Erlich, once a popular Google product manager, started an instant-messaging company called Mogad. Nathan Stoll, who managed Google News, is hard at work on his new company, Mechanical Zoo. (It’s in “stealth mode”- no details.) Former business-development guys Salman Ullah and Sean Dempsey have a new venture capital firm, Merus Capital, that aims in part to fund startups founded by ex-Googlers. (That’s employees, in Googlespeak.) The departures have grown so numerous that the exiles have formed an informal alumni club of ex-Googlers turned entrepreneurs. David Friedberg, another former biz-dev executive, who started a company called WeatherBill, which sells insurance pegged to climate risks, recently attended the club’s first meeting at a conference center in Palo Alto. “I was surprised by the number of things that were being done that could have been done at Google,” he says.
Google has been consistently innovative internally — fostering creativity and risk-taking. And they have been extraordinarily successful at recruiting the very best and brightest. Combine that venture-nurturing with the value of those Google stock options and you get what I thought would happen “any time now”, new startups draining brains. The only way that wasn’t going to happen was a skid to oblivion. Fortunately that hasn’t happened.
Can anybody name some important Microsoft-originated startups? I’m sure there must be some, I just don’t have first-hand knowledge of any.
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