More Google grumpiness Tom Smith
Students in my M&A class know that Google, Inc is my favorite big corporation to be grumpy about. I like a lot of Google products. I actually know a lot about search technology for a law professor, and the Google search engine is a very darn impressive thing. A lot of its power must be secret sauces other than PageRank, the patented algorithm that they sort of, uh, borrowed from Jon Kleinberg. But somebody has to apply the original inventions of others, so why not two Stanford grad students? Gmail is great, even though I live in fear all my deepest secrets will end up in the hands of some Chinese general. Oh well. He probably has bigger fish to fry than I. (But if you’re wondering where the underground Mass is this Sunday in Beijing, I suggest you not send your query by Gmail.) Pretty annoying also is Google’s capital structure. They have two classes of common, one with most of the voting power, the rest for the widows and orphans, CalPers and the rest. Page, Brin and a few other own most of the voting stock. That’s fine on a certain level. It’s a free country, and your money. But, what bothers me is having this J.P. Morgan (a hero in my book) style capital structure, at the same time as they cop this more-PC-than-thou, Bay Area lefty attitude. The could more accurately call themselves Standard Google of California, or Amalgamated Google, Inc. and run around in top hats and tails than T-shirts and Birkenstocks. Sort of, Dominate Globally, Pose Locally. It just kind of makes me want to throw up, that’s all.
Of course I have heard about Google’s investment in nee Wojcicki’s start-up, but I thought that was Brin’s own money. I mean, seriously, the guy is worth 15 billion (or is it 17?), and he can’t put his own measly $4 million into his girlfriends goofy start up idea? Like VCs in the Bay Area would not fall all over themselves to put $4 million in just to cozy up to Google? I mean, why not just say, “here’s $4 million, dear. Go play.” Having said this, who knows, maybe 23andMe will become the next Twitter, another bafflingly dumb idea that seems to have caught on big time. And I have to admit, it is strangely addicting. Those guys should be proud to have invented a new vice, not an easy thing to do. But as to 23andMe, I doubt it. The grump here is, why use Google’s money instead of your own for what is pretty transparently a personal and not a corporate investment?
My sources at Google, such as they are, say Page and Brin are checked out anyway, especially Brin. I hear he spends all his time flying around on private jets being a rich guy. What a waste. Of money, I mean. I mean, $17 billion under the management of a goof. Supposedly Page and Brin showed up at a business meeting recently in their jammies. And they weren’t even blogging. They sound like two Oriental royal infants who have to be indulged by their vizers. J.P. Morgan didn’t go to any meetings in his jammies, and neither did Rockefeller, Insull or any of the other great giants of American capitalism. They ought to get over themselves and stop wasting their shareholders’ money.
UPDATE: Wow. The Google spiders picked this right up. That’s what I mean by impressive. This is America, so we are right to take it for granted.