In the ten years that I’ve been watching him, Larry Page has always wanted to play by his own rules. He wasn’t happy when, in 2001, Google’s investors asked him to step aside as C.E.O. for “adult supervision,” although he and his replacement, Eric Schmidt, forged a strong bond. Page’s drive to think bigger, and to aim for the moon rather than the top of the trees, is shared by his co-founder, Sergey Brin. In 2011, when Page once again became the C.E.O., Brin stepped down from daily management to return to what the pair had done as graduate students: invent.
Invent is what Larry Page’s hero, Nikola Tesla, did. It is what Page and Brin did in 1997, when they concocted a way to make “all the world’s information available” on the Internet. And it is what Brin wanted to do when he left to oversee Google X. While Page got bogged down in bureaucracy, Brin, in the words of one of Google's first employees, who did not wish to be identified, was “out there inventing the future.” The employee went on to list Google X’s many accomplishments under Brin: a self-driving car; Google Glass; a contact lens that measures the glucose levels of tears; an entity called Calico, led by Arthur Levinson, with a mission of extending life.
In a blog post on Monday, Larry Page announced that he would be stepping down as C.E.O. of Google to join Brin in ruling a new parent company, Alphabet, which will include Google, Google X, Calico, and various other ventures. No doubt, there will be conspiracy theorists who seek to explain the move. Some will say that it was his family, his health, his board, ambitious employees. These musings are worthy of the shredder. The one theory that I think is closest to the truth is that Larry Page suffered from Sergey Brin envy. Page had turned into what he had always admonished Googlers not to become: a bureaucrat. He was comfortable, and that made him uncomfortable. The early Google employee said that Page favored the managerial model of Warren Buffett or of General Electric. It was something they used to talk about in the first few years of Google. You pick strong executives and you push them, but you don’t micromanage.
Most C.E.O.s who step down are pushed out, and then they prattle about wanting to spend more time with their families. Larry Page, by contrast, really does want to spend more time with Sergey Brin.
