What Happened To Google's Founders?

on august 10 2015 google's founders larry page and sergey brin announced that they would be stepping away from google's day-to-day operations at the time it seemed like the two were simply stepping back to focus on philanthropy humanitarian issues and other companies you know the regular tech billionaire stuff but since they stepped down both of them basically fell off the face of the planet we've only seen a handful of public appearances if that and it's almost as if sandra piche was google's founder after all sunder is just as popular as larry page and twice as popular sergey brin according to google trends so what happened to google's founders and where are they today well starting off if we take a look at sergey brin and larry page's history at google we'll see that they never really chased the spotlight going back to 1998 larry page was originally the ceo of google when the company was started but it was clear that neither larry page nor sergey brin were particularly great executives in 2001 for instance larry wanted to fire all the project managers at google he believed that engineers should be left their own devices to produce the best results and that pressure from management simply stifled their work so he thought that removing management altogether was a great idea while that might work in an ideal world this was obviously not a realistic decision especially for a startup which needed to be precise accurate and focused after receiving a lot of backlash for this idea though larry understood his shortcomings when it came to running a business and gave up his position as ceo it wasn't some crazy falling out like we so often see though larry did not leave the company like steve jobs or jack dorsey mary actually became really good friends with the new ceo eric schmidt in fact i would even argue that larry is better friends with eric today than his co-founder sergey eric served as ceo for a full 10 years until he himself stepped back stating that day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed larry would become ceo once again in 2011. this did not last long as he would step back in 2015. the reason i bring up the story is to showcase that during larry and sergey's active involvement with google larry was ceo for less than half the time and sergey was never ceo this is in stark contrast to basically every other company founder who loves to have maximum control and be at the center of attention i mean given that they founded the company i don't blame them but this was clearly not the case with google's founders they never chased the spotlight while they were at google so it makes sense that they didn't chase the spotlight after leaving google either aside from being happy with working in the background both sergey brin and larry page are extremely private people neither of them really have any social media presence they don't have publicly known facebook twitter instagram or youtube accounts sergey brin even suggested that him working on google plus was probably a mistake because he's not a very social person so we won't be seeing random dogecoin pumps because of a tweet from sergey but their efforts for privacy stretch way further than simply avoiding social media for instance we don't even know who larry's kids are we know he had a son in 2009 but we don't know his name and we've never even seen a picture of him in 2011 larry revealed that he had another child but we don't even know the gender of this child it's honestly quite impressive that larry has been able to hide this information from the press for so long at the same time though i bet a lot of you guys think that this is quite ironic given that google is infamous for invading users privacy but honestly i don't think larry nor sergey really wanted google to go in that direction in the first place and that brings me into my next point which is that the two lost control of google this isn't anything new within the business world as companies grow larger and larger shareholders and investors have a more significant say in the future of the company usually the interests of the shareholders and executives are aligned though for the most part the primary goal of executives and shareholders is to simply grow the company's reach as much as possible and maximize profit slash shareholder value this is the same case with google shareholders but the problem is that this is not really the founder's goal during the 2000s larry and sergey bended to the shareholders wishes as they agreed that establishing financial stability was a top priority however as google became a dominant player and started pulling in massive profits year after year larry and sergey wanted to focus on something more meaningful they wanted to focus on experimentation research and innovation instead of just increasing profits year after year after year in may of 2013 larry would reveal his long-term vision for google and this would make it clear that larry and the shareholders did not agree whatsoever larry wanted to create something called google island as the name suggests larry wanted google to operate as if it was an island this meant cutting out corporate shareholder and government interests i'm not sure how larry expected the public to react maybe he thought that they would support his goal of focusing on innovation over profits but the public basically just laughed at him the press ran several papers suggesting that this was just for the evidence that tech billionaires were completely disconnected from reality and shareholders just wrote off google island as some ludicrous nerd fantasy the fact that the public ridiculed the idea made it evident that neither larry or sergey really had control over google anymore now technically they still own 51 percent of the voting shares so they could technically do whatever they wanted but doing something that your shareholders relented would still not be that good of an idea and this lack of control probably just pushed them to leave the company objective issues regarding control and the company's future weren't the only things that played the duo's leadership though another major factor pushing the two to leave public life was their personal issues in 2012 larry page would be struck by vocal cord paralysis larry had actually been dealing with vocal cord issues for the entirety of his life but the situation became especially bad starting in 2012 his voice would become more and more hoarse and quiet and larry would begin avoiding earnings calls speaking events conferences and of course the media in the meantime sergey would undergo his own pr nightmare in 2014 it would be revealed that sergey brin had been having an affair with the google employee named amanda rosenberg at the time he was married to ann watcheski who you may know as the founder of 23andme to make things worse and sister susan is the ceo of youtube so i would assume the executive meetings at google were quite awkward after that larry page was also not amused whatsoever about the situation larry had been friends with sergey since college and he saw sergey's relationship with anne grow first hand this affair was completely unexpected for larry and he basically started shouting sergey ever since larry stopped talking to sergey and it doesn't seem like larry ever forgave sergey fortunately for sergey he had a large enough take in google that he couldn't be ousted but i'd imagine that public events were embarrassing to attend and this was likely a major factor driving sergey out of the public's view i think we'd agree that all the reasons we outlined thus far are valid reasons to avoid the spotlight but i think the biggest reason sergey and larry have shied away from the public is that google's original vision has been lost if you haven't noticed yet larry and sergey never aimed to build a massive tech giant their vision was always to build a research company that was run by engineers just think about the projects that these two are most excited about one of the projects that larry was most excited about was google self-driving car project similarly one of the projects that circuit was most excited about was google glass though both of these projects have more or less just been massive money pits it seems like their passion has always lied in google's moonshot factory for them it's never been about maximizing revenue from ads or dominating various sectors of the market but as we touched on it that's what google has turned into google is more bureaucratic profit hungry and monopolistic than ever before google used to consistently rank as the top place to work year after year but at the end of 2019 google actually dropped out of the top 10 places to work now i still personally think that google's overall impact on the world is overwhelmingly positive but google is by no means perfect google's original motto was don't be evil and i'm not sure if larry and sergey still believe that that's still completely true with google the duo have awarded answering questions about google stance in regards to privacy monopolies and google's various questionable decisions if they come out of your shell however it's just a matter of time until a reporter asks them about their thoughts on google's business practices they've never been interested in that side of the business and likely prefer that senator pichai and the other executives deal with that instead but that still leaves a question what have larry and sergey been up to since they left google well larry has been able to focus his time on flying cars over the past couple of years he invested into multiple flying car companies and he seems pretty optimistic about the future of flying taxis reports also suggest that larry has been spending large amounts of time on his private caribbean island as for sergey we really don't know much about what he's been up to in january of 2017 sergey made a surprise appearance at a protest against trump's immigration order at the san francisco airport and there are reports suggesting that sergey is working on some sort of sky yacht for 100 million dollars but that's pretty much it for sergey the two still hold 51 of the voting shares of alphabet though so they could technically return to the company and change the direction if they want it now of course they can't implement something as crazy as google island but they could definitely revise google stands on privacy or its workplace environment however the two just sold 1 billion worth of stock which was their first stock sale since 2017 so it seems like the two are going to just let google do its own thing for the best or the worst do you guys think sergey and larry will come back to google just like steve jobs or michael dell comment that down below also drop a like if you're grateful that they founded google and of course consider joining our discord community to suggest future video ideas and consider subscribing to see more questions logically answered but until then i'm hari and i'll see you guys on the next one you

Channel: Logically Answered

Views: 770,919

Keywords: larry page, sergey brin, google founders, who founded google, what happened to googles founders, what happened to larry page, what happened to sergey brin, what is larry page doing now, what is sergey brin doing now, larry page and sergey brin, larry page and sergey brin google, larry page google, sergey brin google, larry page flying car, who are googles founders, who are the founders of google, larry page interview, sergey brin interview, google founders interview

Id: piF1AzEBSn0

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021