Do you trust Larry Page?
The problem for Page, though, is that he is not a strategy and business nerd. Page is, for lack of a better description, a change-the-world nerd, and it seems clear that he found the day-to-day business of managing a very profitable utility to be not only uninteresting but a distraction from what he truly wanted to do.
.. That, though, leads to a bigger question: why should all of these disparate ventures be a part of the same company at all?
.. That is actually an easy one to answer: Page and Brin can do whatever they want because of Google’s dual-class structure. From Google’s IPO letter:
.. As Page sees it, it all comes down to ambition – a commodity of which the world simply doesn’t have a large enough supply. In the midst of one of its periodic booms, Silicon Valley, still the epicentre of the tech business world, has become short-sighted, he says…
Page estimates that only about 50 investors are chasing the real breakthrough technologies that have the potential to make a material difference to the lives of most people on earth. If there is something holding these big ideas back, it is not a shortage of money or even the barrier of insurmountable technical hurdles. When breakthroughs of the type he has in mind are pursued, it is “not really being driven by any fundamental technical advance. It’s just being driven by people working on it and being ambitious,” he says. Not enough institutions – particularly governments – are thinking expansively enough about these issues: “We’re probably underinvested as a world in that.”