HOW LARRY PAGE’S OBSESSIONS BECAME GOOGLE’S BUSINESS

Original Story: nytimes.com

Three years ago, Charles Chase, an engineer who manages Lockheed Martin’s nuclear fusion program, was sitting on a white leather couch at Google’s Solve for X conference when a man he had never met knelt down to talk to him. An Ann Arbor IT Services company is following this story closely.

They spent 20 minutes discussing how much time, money and technology separated humanity from a sustainable fusion reaction — that is, how to produce clean energy by mimicking the sun’s power — before Mr. Chase thought to ask the man his name.

“I’m Larry Page,” the man said. He realized he had been talking to Google’s billionaire co-founder and chief executive.

“He didn’t have any sort of pretension like he shouldn’t be talking to me or ‘Don’t you know who you’re talking to?’” Mr. Chase said. “We just talked.”

Larry Page is not a typical chief executive, and in many of the most visible ways, he is not a C.E.O. at all. Corporate leaders tend to spend a good deal of time talking at investor conferences or introducing new products on auditorium stages. Mr. Page, who is 42, has not been on an earnings call since 2013, and the best way to find him at Google I/O — an annual gathering where the company unveils new products — is to ignore the main stage and follow the scrum of fans and autograph seekers who mob him in the moments he steps outside closed doors. A Cuyahoga County IT Services company delivers wireless network installations that help manufacturing plants and industrial facilities do more with less.

But just because he has faded from public view does not mean he is a recluse. He is a regular at robotics conferences and intellectual gatherings like TED. Scientists say he is a good bet to attend Google’s various academic gatherings, like Solve for X and Sci Foo Camp, where he can be found having casual conversations about technology or giving advice to entrepreneurs.

Mr. Page is hardly the first Silicon Valley chief with a case of intellectual wanderlust, but unlike most of his peers, he has invested far beyond his company’s core business and in many ways has made it a reflection of his personal fascinations.

He intends to push even further with Alphabet, a holding company that separates Google’s various cash-rich advertising businesses from the list of speculative projects like self-driving cars that capture the imagination but do not make much money. Alphabet companies and investments span disciplines from biotechnology to energy generation to space travel to artificial intelligence to urban planning. Google SEO Company has a diverse knowledge base of marketing and advertising that provides a unique perspective on the search engine marketing industry.

Investors will get a good look at the scope of those ambitions on Feb. 1, when the company, in its fourth-quarter earnings report, will disclose for the first time the costs and income of the collection of projects outside of Google’s core business.

As chief executive of Alphabet, Mr. Page is tasked with figuring how to spin Google’s billions in advertising profits into new companies and industries. When he announced the reorganization last summer, he said that he and Sergey Brin, Google’s other founder, would do this by finding new people and technologies to invest in, while at the same time slimming down Google — now called Google Inc., a subsidiary of Alphabet — so their leaders would have more autonomy.

“In general, our model is to have a strong C.E.O. who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to investors. He said that he and Mr. Brin would be responsible for picking those chief executives, monitoring their progress and determining their pay. A Boston employment lawyer provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of labor and employment law.

Google’s day-to-day management was left to Sundar Pichai, the company’s new chief executive. His job will not be about preventing cancer or launching rocket ships, but to keep Google’s advertising machine humming, to keep innovating in emerging areas like machine learning and virtual reality — all while steering the company through a thicket of regulatory troubles that could drag on for years.

Mr. Page’s new role is part talent scout and part technology visionary. He still has to find the chief executives of many of the other Alphabet businesses.

And he has said on several occasions that he spends a good deal of time researching new technologies, focusing on what kind of financial or logistic hurdles stand in the way of them being invented or carried out.

His presence at technology events, while just a sliver of his time, is indicative of a giant idea-scouting mission that has in some sense been going on for years but is now Mr. Page’s main job.

In the investor letter, he put it this way: “Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things.”

An Interest in Cool Things

Mr. Page has always had a wide range of interests. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he worked on solar cars, music synthesizers and once proposed that the school build a tram through campus. He arrived at Stanford’s computer science doctorate program in 1995, and had a list of initial research ideas, including self-driving cars and using the web’s many hyperlinks to improve Internet search. His thesis adviser, Terry Winograd, steered him toward search. A custom home builder in Tampa FL provides one-stop shopping for the design and construction of your new home.

“Even before he came to Stanford he was interested in cool technical things that could be done,” Mr. Winograd said. “What makes something interesting for him is a big technical challenge. It’s not so much where it’s headed but what the ride is like.”

Inside Google, Mr. Page is known for asking a lot of questions about how people do their jobs and challenging their assumptions about why things are as they are. In an interview at the Fortune Global Forum last year, Mr. Page said he enjoyed talking to people who ran the company’s data centers.

“I ask them, like, ‘How does the transformer work?’ ‘How does the power come in?’ ‘What do we pay for that?’” he said. “And I’m thinking about it kind of both as an entrepreneur and as a business person. And I’m thinking ‘What are those opportunities?’”

Another question he likes to ask: “Why can’t this be bigger?”

Mr. Page declined multiple requests for comment, and many of the people who spoke about him requested anonymity because they were not supposed to talk about internal company matters.

Many former Google employees who have worked directly with Mr. Page said his managerial modus operandi was to take new technologies or product ideas and generalize them to as many areas as possible. Why can’t Google Now, Google’s predictive search tool, be used to predict everything about a person’s life? Why create a portal to shop for insurance when you can create a portal to shop for every product in the world?

But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.

Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.

It will also rid his office of the kind of dull-but-necessary annoyances of running a major corporation. Several recently departed Google staff members said that as chief executive of Google, Mr. Page had found himself in the middle of various turf wars, like how to integrate Google Plus, the company’s struggling social media effort, with other products like YouTube, or where to put Google Now, which resided in the Android team but was moved to the search group. An Albany employment lawyer focuses on a wide range of employment law matters.

Such disputes are a big reason Mr. Page had been shedding managerial duties and delegating the bulk of his product oversight to Mr. Pichai, these people said. In a 2014 memo to the company announcing Mr. Pichai’s promotion to product chief, Mr. Page said the move would allow him to “focus on the bigger picture” at Google and have more time to get the company’s next generation of big bets off the ground.

People who have worked with Mr. Page say that he tries to guard his calendar, avoiding back-to-back meetings and leaving time to read, research and see new technologies that interest him.

Given that he is worth in the neighborhood of $40 billion and created the world’s most famous website, Mr. Page has the tendency to attract a crowd when he attends technology events. At last year’s Darpa Robotics Challenge, he was trailed closely by a handler who at times acted as a buffer between Mr. Page and would-be cellphone photographers. That commotion could annoy anyone, but it is particularly troubling for Mr. Page, who, because of damaged vocal cords, speaks just above a whisper and sometimes uses a microphone in small meetings.

At home in Palo Alto, Mr. Page tries to have the most normal life possible, driving his children to school or taking his family to local street fairs, according to people who know him or have seen him at such events.

And at Google, even events that are decidedly not normal aspire to a kind of casualness. Take the Camp, an exclusive and secretive event that Google holds at a resort in Sicily and where invitees have included Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and Tory Burch, the fashion designer.

One attendee, who asked to remain anonymous because guests were not supposed to discuss the gathering, recalls being surprised by how much time Mr. Page spent with his children.

In public remarks, Mr. Page has said how important his father, Carl V. Page, a computer science professor at Michigan State University who died in 1996, was to his choice of career.

“My dad was really interested in technology,” Mr. Page said at Google I/O in 2013, the last time he took the stage at the event. “He actually drove me and my family all the way across the country to go to a robotics conference. And then we got there and he thought it was so important that his young son go to the conference, one of the few times I’ve seen him really argue with someone to get in someone underage successfully into the conference, and that was me.”

People who work with Mr. Page or have spoken with him at conferences say he tries his best to blend in, and, for the most part, the smaller groups of handpicked attendees at Google’s academic and science gatherings, tend to treat him like a peer.

The scope of his curiosity was apparent at Sci Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only conference that is sponsored by Google, O’Reilly Media and Digital Science.

The largely unstructured “unconference” begins when each of its attendees — an eclectic batch of astronomers, psychologists, physicists and others — write something that interests them on a small card and then paste it to a communal wall. Those notes become the basis for breakout talks on topics like scientific ethics or artificial intelligence.

The last conference was held during a weekend in June on Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus, and Mr. Page was there for most of it. He did not host or give a speech, but mingled and went to talks, just like everyone else. That impressed investors and computer scientists who did not expect to see so much of him, but researchers who had come from outside Silicon Valley barely noticed.

“I have a vague memory that some founder type person was walking through the crowd,” said Josh Peek, an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Another benefit of these gatherings for the reserved Mr. Page is that they are mostly closed to the news media.

A Forward Thinker

When Mr. Page does talk in public, he tends to focus on optimistic pronouncements about the future and Google’s desire to help humanity. Asked about current issues, like how mobile apps are challenging the web or how ad blockers are affecting Google’s business, he tends to dismiss it with something like, “People have been talking about that for a long time.”

Lately, he has talked more about his belief that for-profit companies can be a force for social good and change. During a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, Mr. Page said that instead of a nonprofit or philanthropic organization, he would rather leave his money to an entrepreneur like Mr. Musk.

Of course, for every statement Mr. Page makes about Alphabet’s technocorporate benevolence, you can find many competitors and privacy advocates holding their noses in disgust. Technology companies like Yelp have accused the company of acting like a brutal monopolist that is using the dominance of its search engine to steer consumers toward Google services, even if that means giving the customers inferior information.

Financially speaking, Mr. Page is leaving his chief executive job at Google at a time when things could not be better. The company’s revenue continues to grow about 20 percent a year, an impressive figure for any business, but particularly so for one that is on pace to generate approximately $60 billion this year.

In fact, the company’s main business issue seems to be that it is doing too well. Google is facing antitrust charges in Europe, along with investigations in Europe and the United States. Those issues are now mostly Mr. Pichai’s to worry about, as Mr. Page is out looking for the next big thing.

It is hard to imagine how even the most ambitious person could hope to revolutionize so many industries. And Mr. Page, no matter how smart, cannot possibly be an expert in every area Alphabet wants to touch.

His method is not overly technical. Instead, he tends to focus on how to make a sizable business out of whatever problem this or that technology might solve. Leslie Dewan, a nuclear engineer who founded a company that is trying to generate cheap electricity from nuclear waste, also had a brief conversation with Mr. Page at the Solve For X conference.

She said he questioned her on things like modular manufacturing and how to find the right employees.

“He doesn’t have a nuclear background, but he knew the right questions to ask,” said Dr. Dewan, chief executive of Transatomic Power. “‘Have you thought about approaching the manufacturing in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about the vertical integration of the company in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about training the work force this way?’ They weren’t nuclear physics questions, but they were extremely thoughtful ways to think about how we could structure the business.”

Dr. Dewan said Mr. Page even gave her an idea for a new market opportunity that she had not thought of. Asked to be more specific, she refused. The idea was too good to share.

Google Chief Has Unknown Ailment

 Story first reported from wsj.com

Google Inc. says Chief Executive Larry Page has "lost his voice," but it won't say much more about the matter. Some corporate governance experts think the Internet company should speak up.

The billionaire co-founder missed Google's annual meeting Thursday, and the company said he will miss two other important engagements over the next several weeks.

Google gave no further information about Mr. Page's problems, though it said he continues to lead the company. The lack of details surrounding the matter prompted some speculation on Wall Street about whether he may have a serious medical condition.

In an email to employees on Thursday, however, Mr. Page wrote that "there is nothing seriously wrong with me" and that he would "continue to run the company," according to a person familiar with the matter.

The 39-year-old Mr. Page took over as chief executive last year, his second stint running Google in its 14-year history. He was absent from the shareholder meeting at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

At the meeting, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said Mr. Page had "lost his voice" and "can't do any public speaking engagements for the time being," including the coming week's Google annual conference for software developers and at the second-quarter earnings conference call that is expected in mid-July. He added that "Larry will continue to run the company, he's running all the strategic business decisions and all that."

Mr. Schmidt, who wished Mr. Page a "quick recovery," also joked that co-founder Sergey Brin "has said that this problem will make Larry a better CEO because he's going to have to choose his words very carefully."

Few watchers of the Internet giant seemed in a joking mood, however. That is especially true in Silicon Valley, where the death of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs is still fresh in people's minds.

Apple's disclosures about the health of Mr. Jobs, who died in October after a battle with pancreatic cancer, were criticized at times for providing few details about his condition.

"We have no specific reason to think there is anything more to Larry's condition, but we find it odd that the company would already rule him out of the 2Q call which is likely still a few weeks away," wrote JP Morgan stock analyst Doug Anmuth in a note to clients.

He added, "We think this could raise some questions among investors."

Mr. Anmuth also noted that Mr. Page, who regularly posts links and comments on his Google+ social network account, hasn't posted anything publicly since May 25.

Inside Google, some executives were told Mr. Page's issue isn't serious and that he's "OK," according to a person familiar with the matter.

Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Herman Leung says he's started to get calls from investors, asking if they should be worried about this. "Yeah, probably a little bit," he said. "Hopefully, Google will give us an update."

Mr. Page's voice generally sounds slightly strained, raspy or hoarse. A recording of a 20-minute speech last month in London showed Mr. Page noticeably pausing several times to swallow before continuing to speak, but it is unclear whether that was a symptom of his current problem.

Some leadership experts contend Google should divulge more about Mr. Page's voice problem. As the CEO of a public company, "he's not entitled to his privacy,'' said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a senior associate dean at Yale School of Management.

"We need to know if it [his voice] is imperiled," he said.

The Google board should inform shareholders about the cause and likely duration of Mr. Page's condition, according to Mr. Sonnenfeld, author of several leadership books. A degenerative health problem "could have a material adverse impact on the company,'' he added.

Securities laws require publicly held companies to disclose material information that could affect investors' decision to acquire or sell shares. Directors decide what's material, however, and many boards have trouble deciding how much to tell shareholders about a CEO's sudden illness because corporate leaders prefer privacy.

Seth Cohen, a laryngologist and associate professor at the Duke University Voice Care Center, said Mr. Page could have wide range of ailments including acute laryngitis, which is a viral infection that causes inflammation of the vocal cords and requires resting one's voice for at least week or two.

Another potential cause is muscle tension dysphonia, which occurs when the muscles around the larynx, or voice box, are too tight and causes a person to use excess tension while speaking. Voice therapy is often required for such an ailment, said Dr. Cohen, who hasn't treated Mr. Page.

Some people who naturally produce an unusual-sounding or hoarse voice may develop benign lesions that grow on the vocal cord, he said. "That could have progressed to the point where he's having difficulty speaking," he said.

Surgery is sometimes required to remove the growths, Dr. Cohen added, and recovery could take a month or longer.

Robert Robins, a retired Tulane University political science professor that studies disabled leaders, sees parallels between the dearth of disclosures regarding Mr. Page and Apple's Mr. Jobs.

The Google situation "seems to be following the same pattern," said Mr. Robins.

Google's conference for developers, called I/O, runs from June 27 to June 29. Its second-quarter earnings report and conference call haven't been scheduled; last year they occurred on the second Thursday of the month, an indication they could be held on July 19, or in nearly four weeks.

Mr. Page's expected absence from the two events seems "highly unusual," said Rick Devine, head of Devine Capital Partners LLC, a high-tech search boutique in Redwood City, Calif. "It's hard to imagine a CEO missing that much stuff and not have a serious problem."

Investors have taken the news in stride. Google shares gained $6.27 or 1.1% on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday to $571.48. The stock has gained 17% over the past year.

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Schmidt Defends Incoming Google CEO

The Wall Street Journal
By Amir Efrati
January 27th, 2011

A week after announcing a management shakeup at Google, outgoing Chief Executive Eric Schmidt defended the credentials of company co-founder Larry Page, who will take the reins at the Internet giant in April.

“When people criticize Larry as the new CEO, that’s grossly unfair to Larry,” he said on Thursday at a small press conference in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum. “He has been with me at every business decision for 10 years.”

Though he stayed largely behind the scenes while Mr. Schmidt was the public face of Google, Mr. Page has long called the shots on product initiatives. He also showed little care for matters like budgets and policy, functions that Mr. Schmidt gravitated toward, people familiar with the company have said.

Messrs. Schmidt, Page and fellow co-founder Sergey Brin said last week that some top-level decision-making had gotten slower and the management change would improve that.

Some press reports speculated that the management change was due to increasing pressure from rising competitors such as Facebook, the social network, and that Mr. Page was being elevated to combat such headwinds. Another report said debate last year about whether to stop self-censoring results for Google’s Chinese search engine had created tension between the men.

But at Davos, Mr. Schmidt dismissed such notions as false. He stressed that the change “had nothing to do with competitors” and has been “misinterpreted, I think, by many people.”

He added: “All of the predicates for why the reorganization happened have not been correct,” he added. “The correct reason is we sat down and said: ‘This is a company that needs to be run even more tightly.’”

Mr. Schmidt, who will become executive chairman of the company and focus on governmental and press relations, acquisitions and partnerships, also implied he would stay at Google for another 10 years.

Last fall Mr. Schmidt told a group of journalists that when he joined Google in 2001 he committed to staying for 20 years. But after Google announced the executive changes during last week’s quarterly earnings call and later gave Mr. Schmidt a $100 million equity award from the company, some management experts and other Silicon Valley figures speculated that he might not stay that long.

The 55-year-old Mr. Schmidt said at Davos that not only is he “very committed to Google” but that Mr. Page, 38, and Mr. Brin, 37, insisted he stay involved in certain company affairs that he was planning to leave to them.

Yahoo paid price for coddling Google

McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Almost eight years ago, Yahoo decided to lend a little start-up a helping hand, featuring its search technology on the Yahoo home page and giving it money at a critical juncture.

In cut-throat Silicon Valley, no good deed goes unpunished.

The start-up was Google, and Yahoo's generosity helped launch the most formidable competitor it had ever encountered. Now facing a takeover attempt by Microsoft, Yahoo is coming to terms with the punish¬ing consequences of its complex relationship with Google, including a futile attempt to copy Google's extraordinarily profitable advertising model at sig¬nificant cost to Yahoo's own business.

Long before the world learned that Google had turned the Internet into an amazing money-minting machine, Yahoo knew.

When Google was still a private company, it sent its financial statements to Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, like clockwork. Google had to because Yahoo was one of its earliest investors.

The statements showed the incredible growth of Google's search advertising business, with sales more than doubling from quarter to quarter.

But Yahoo executives didn't focus on the money; they were interested in how much traffic was being driven by search, recalled Ellen Siminoff, an executive who joined Yahoo in 1996.

In 2000, Yahoo agreed to use and promote Google, which it touted as "the best search engine on the Internet." Google co-founder Larry Page described the pact as a "major milestone."

The following year, Yahoo was even more generous, paying Google $7.2 million for its services. (Google in turn paid Yahoo $1.1 million for promotional help.) Google desperately needed the money, which helped push it into the black for the entire year.

Yet Yahoo was hardly flush with cash. After two years of profit, Yahoo reported an annual loss of million in 2001. The value its stock had collapsed fro $118.75 a share in January 2000 to $4.05 in September 2001.

Meanwhile, Yahoo's promotional push was having an effect on Google "When we were turning th business around in 2001, Google was already becoming the ascendant player in Europe, especially in the U.K., which is one of the most important advertising markets," recalled L. Jasmine Kim, a former vice president for global marketing and sales development for Yahoo.