Larry Page might become the best CEO America has ever seen.
That’s a grandiose pronouncement for the relatively low-profile Page, who hasn’t even finished his fourth year in Google’s top job.
But Page has been laying big bets for Google that move the company beyond its original mission of organizing the world’s information and making it useful and accessible.
In Page’s vision, Google should do no less than create the future.
“In technology what we need is revolutionary change, not incremental change,” Page said earlier this year in an onstage interview.
That may sound like a quixotic goal. But Page, 41, has backed up his talk with money, some of it his own (Forbes puts his wealth at $32 billion; he owns a seven percent stake in Google). He has pushed the company into fields as diverse as biotech, the networked home, driverless cars and artificial intelligence, even as the company expands and refines its existing core businesses. Should any of his so-called moonshots pay off, Google as we know it will be unlike any business ever created.
“There is no dearth of visionary founders in the Valley but he tops them all,” said Ram Shriram, a founding Google board member and a venture capitalist. “He thinks of really big ideas and how to scale them in ways that were previously thought impossible.”
I started wondering about Page’s legacy when he recently reorganized the top of the company — his second reorganization in 3 1/2 years. This one relieved him of some day-to-day duties. In a memo to employees, he said he wanted to be free to “focus on the bigger picture.”
For Page, the “bigger picture” is as big as it gets, nothing less than some of humanity’s biggest challenges, such as battling disease, giving poorer parts of the world access to the Internet and reducing automobile deaths.
Since cofounding Google in 1998 with Sergey Brin, Page has come a long way as a leader. The two met at Stanford University and created an algorithm to rank websites that would then appear in search results. And that algorithm, the source of much of Google’s future success, is called PageRank.
Page was the new firm’s CEO, determined that Google would not be a typical company. Then, he was known for his singular focus and unusual approach to management. At one point, he famously fired managers because he believed engineers should be managed by engineers. He was generally opposed to delegation. His argumentative style, which worked well in his relationship with Brin, wasn’t appreciated by all.
The company’s investors sought a professional manager, and in 2001 Eric Schmidt, who had been an executive at Sun and the chief executive of Novell, became Google’s chief executive.
Even with Schmidt in the top job, the three co-ran the firm. Page became president of products.
When Page became Google’s CEO again in April 2011, it wasn’t clear he had the practical expertise and business acumen to run the entire company and manage the executive team.
But Page has more than held his own.
“He’s a unique blend of a leader who can keep the wheels moving on a bus while building the bus into a rocket ship,” said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, an analysis and research firm.
Google’s stock has risen nearly 90 percent during his tenure, compared to a roughly 70 percent rise in the tech-heavy Nasdaq. The company has more than $60 billion in cash. And as Google’s ambitions have expanded, it has roughly doubled in size to 55,000 employees.
But wait, there’s more. Google Ventures has become a force as one of the biggest venture firms in Silicon Valley. Page led a redesign of many Google web services and pushed his vision that users should have one sign-in for all of Google. He launched Chromebook, a laptop running on Google’s Chrome operating system, unveiled Google Glass and installed high-speed fiber-optic Internet cables in Kansas City as a prelude to its expansion to other U.S. cities such as Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah.
“Of the undisputed kings of the Internet, who has diversified the most?” said John Battelle, chairman and founder of New Co. and author of “The Search.” “It has got to be Google.”
To be fair, with the company’s revenue growth and cash reserves, Page has had the wind at his back, allowing him to delve into new initiatives, none of which have yet become a profitable business. He hasn’t faced the challenges of someone like Jeffrey Immelt at General Electric, who is shifting an entire company into a new realm. Or Virginia “Ginni” Rometty of IBM, trying to turn around one of the most storied names in tech by taking on companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft in cloud computing.
Google has had its stumbles. People haven’t flocked to its social network, Google+, a problem that could plague the company as advertisers more and more turn to social sites as the place to spend their money. Comedians skewered Google Glass, a foray into wearable computing.
But Page does not appear to have not been tarnished by these and other setbacks. In fact, Google’s culture builds in the idea of failure.
“He makes you think bigger,” said Maarten ‘t Hooft, managing partner at Quest Venture Partners who worked on Google’s Android team. “He doesn’t seem to fear big challenges. Failure is built into this idea.”
But more than redesigning the look and feel of Google, Page is placing bets on projects that are of a greater order of magnitude than anything the company has done so far.
Google created and invested in Calico, now an independent biotech company run by Art Levinson, the former CEO of Genentech, to explore aging. Page bought Nest, which could be the basis for Google’s smart home division. Judging from other recent acquisitions, the company is looking into artificial intelligence. Google is also exploring Internet access to remote areas with its Project Loon. That’s not even mentioning other products from Google X, its semi-secret research arm, such as driverless cars, which seem close to reality, and contact lenses that measure glucose levels.
There is a real danger of course that Page will become so enamored with Google’s ambitious endeavors and skunkwork projects that he will allow the company to become more bureaucratic and take his eye off of Google’s key businesses.
But my view is that Page is equally relentless on execution and innovation.
He is constantly asking questions, said Hal Gregersen, executive director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Leadership Center, and seems to be trying to build “an organization that keeps and protects at its very core the need for people to ask the uncomfortable question.”
Page is also looking for the next big thing. “He is obsessed with how does Google use all these resources to have a positive impact on the world,” Gregersen said.
For Larry Page, Google should do nothing less than make the future happen.
If he succeeds, Page will set a new bar for what great companies and their leaders can do.
Contact Michelle Quinn at 510-394-4196 and mquinn@mercurynews.com. Follow her at twitter.com/michellequinn.
