Brain Drain at Google; The Utopia is Over

Some high profile employees seem to be itching to get out of Google. The image of Google being "a utopian place to work" as Craig Silverstein, director of technology, (and Employee #1 at the company) said in an interview with CNBC, seems to be waning.

Some recent announcements make it clear that the utopian atmosphere may be fading. Just within the last few months we've seen their vice president of engineering, Douglas Merrill, VP for global sales and operations, Sheryl Sandberg, and their CFO George Reyes step down. (see a more comprehensive list in Appendix A)

In a recent NY Times article google dismissed concerns that it was threatened by an employee exodus.

“We have a deep bench and work hard to grow leaders within the company,” Google said in a statement. “We are attracting immensely talented people around the world, every day.”

The truth is that hundreds of the 2,300 Google employees hired before the IPO in 2004 are hitting their fourth anniversary. This will allow these lucky employees to collectively cash in estimated $2.6 billion before taxes. Their good fortune could stir jealousies as the later hires park their Toyota's next to a cube mate's Porsche, then head into the office to do the same job.

Google is not the same company it was just four years ago. It has morphed into a behemoth and rivals other large tech companies. The kind of employees it attracts is different from the type of employees that were first attracted to google. This is evidenced by looking at where some of the high profile google employees are going now (see Appendix). Google no longer has that startup mentality or feel to it.

Google will need to find new ways to retain those already wealthy workers and attract new recruits because options won't continue to have a big payoff. Google has earned the reputation for paying fairly stingy salaries. It could get away with that in the early days where stock options supplemented compensation, but that model will have to change if they are to stay ahead.

They'll need to adjust to the changing employee landscape if they want to continue attracting people that drive innovation the way the pioneering employees did in google's first years.

Skooliki
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http://outervillage.com

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Appendix:
(source: Wired)

A list of high profile Google employees that have recently left the company.
Interesting to see that they all seem to like to work for much smaller tech companies. I guess that is what originally attracted them to Google in the first place.

* Gokul Rajaram, the "Godfather of AdSense," is working on a stealth startup.

* Louis Monier, Anna Patterson, Russell Power are working on a search service called Cuill (pronounced "cool") -- it's said to index the web more economically than Google. Uses a web crawler called "twiceler."

* Jason Liebman, Sanjay Raman and Daniel Blackman co-founded HowCast, a network of "how to" videos. The company has apparently raised $8 million in funding.

* Steffen Mueller started a "search engine community" called Topicle.

* Vanessa Fox left Google for real estate search site Zillow.

* Dan Daugherty is heading RentBits, a real estate rental site. He's got support from fellow ex-Googler Tim Moynihan, who is COO of the site.

* Veteran user experience designer Kevin "Fury" Fox joined FriendFeed, a company entirely composed of ex-Googlers.

* Also at FriendFeed: Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Paul "Don't be evil" Buchheit, Sanjeev Singh and Ana Yang.

* Brian Dick, a biz dev exec in New York who helped found Google TV Ads, is now at LimeWire.

* Jess Lee, a Google Maps product manager, quit Google this month to join Polyvore.

* Nathan Stoll "broke up" with Google in December. Still not clear what he's up to.

* Sean Knapp, Belsasar Lepe and Bismarck Lepe founded Ooyala, a video delivery platform, in early 2007. So far, they've raised about $10 million.

* Jason Shellen left Google in August 2007. Started incubator The Secret Agency.

* Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman are twittering.

* Rob Radez, Gabor Cselle are working at email startup Xobni. Radez just left Google a couple weeks ago; Cselle fled about a year ago.

* Chris Sacca, former head of special initiatives at Google, is now an angel investor and private equity principal.

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