I’m not really the type of person to extol high-profile CEO’s I’ve never met before, but Larry Page and Sergey Brin are different. They’re the founders of GOOGLE. We touched upon the Google story briefly today in Entrepreneurship class when discussing IPOs. The conversation piqued my curiosity enough to look into it a little more (click on the title link above).
It’s really quite interesting. What I’m posting is a link to a SEC filing that came out in 2004, but it’s also a Letter from the Founders to investors. It’s essentially their “Letter to the World” (I’m reminded of that marvelous scene in ATLAS SHRUGGED when the protagonist steps up to the microphone and brazenly says, “This is John Galt Speaking.” This isn’t exactly the same thing, but it comes pretty damn close). Google is a remarkable, relatively young company that I’ve grown to have tremendous respect for. They have a young, ingenious, new product that continues to do more and more. They’re not motivated simply by short-term gains, but love of innovation and technology. They have a sense of social responsibility and an awareness of what their technology means to the world. The last time mankind attempted to the harness the knowledge of the world in one spot was with the Library of Alexandria. Now we have Google, and at several billion webpages of net searching, they’re still growing.
Read the Letter if you can. SEC filings are usually dry, dusty, and filled with the financial and legal jargon only an MBA would understand, but this one is different. It’s bold, brazen, funny, and has that wonderful dash of humanism. Yes, there are companies out there that do have a soul. Google is one of them. The statement is long, but there are some notable passages:
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. When we started Google in 1998 out of Stanford University, we searched about 30 million web pages. And at the time that was pretty competitive. That was about as big as most search engines, not quite as big as the biggest, but we soon overcame those. Now we’re searching many billions of web pages, so over a hundred times bigger, and Google works well...
Our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything. Google is organized around the ability to attract and leverage the talent of exceptional technologists and business people. We have been lucky to recruit many creative, principled and hard working stars. We hope to recruit many more in the future. We will reward and treat them well...
The significant employee ownership of Google has made us what we are today. Because of our employee talent, Google is doing exciting work in nearly every area of computer science. We are in a very competitive industry where the quality of our product is paramount. Talented people are attracted to Google because we empower them to change the world; Google has large computational resources and distribution that enables individuals to make a difference. Our main benefit is a workplace with important projects, where employees can contribute and grow. We are focused on providing an environment where talented, hard working people are rewarded for their contributions to Google and for making the world a better place...
Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served--as shareholders and in all other ways--by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company...
Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see...
We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. In pursuing this goal, we will always be mindful of our responsibilities to our shareholders, employees, customers and business partners. With our products, Google connects people and information all around the world for free. We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail, which provides an efficient one gigabyte Gmail account for free. ... AdWords connects users and advertisers efficiently, helping both. AdSense helps fund a huge variety of online web sites and enables authors who could not otherwise publish. Last year we created Google Grants—a growing program in which hundreds of non-profits addressing issues, including the environment, poverty and human rights, receive free advertising. And now, we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation...
Google is not a conventional company. Eric, Sergey and I intend to operate Google differently, applying the values it has developed as a private company to its future as a public company. ... We will live up to our “don’t be evil” principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results. We have a dual class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team...
The Management Team
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