Management Mistakes and Successes, Tenth Edition

Chapter 7. Google—An Entrepreneurial Juggernaut

In 1998 Sergey Brin and Larry Page dropped out of the Ph.D program at Stanford to start Google in a friend's garage. Along the way, they discovered a powerful marketing tool that would revolutionize advertising. Six years later, on August 19, 2004, they took this Internet search and advertising firm public at a price of $85 a share. One year after the initial public offering (IPO), Google stock closed at $280. By 2007, the stock had gone over $700, and lots of people had become very rich. But this was to cause some serious concerns for the firm.

BRAIN DRAIN

Craig Silverstein, a fellow Stanford Ph.D student, was the first hire of Page and Brin. He helped them move their equipment out of Page's dorm room and into a place with more space and, more importantly, a garage. In early 1999, five months later, the enterprise had grown enough to move into offices on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. The firm's fortunes continued to improve, and Craig became director of technology in charge of product development. Before many years, Craig realized he had become very rich indeed.

From the beginning, Google gave its employees stock options in lieu of competitive salaries that in those days it could ill afford. These options gave employees the right to purchase a given number of shares of stock at a certain price, called a vested price, some years in the future. Even before going public in 2004, it had granted two big batches of such options. ...