A New Alphabet

I was intrigued at Google’s decision today to undergo a massive corporate restructuring. For years Google has been ploughing profits from its monopoly advertising business into some radically ambitious projects. From upending the telecom industry with Google Fiber, reimagining transportation via self driving cars, and even extending the human lifespan with Calico - some huge innovations are happening at Google. However, these have all been sideshow projects regulated to be small divisions of what is becoming a massive bureaucracy.

I’m extremely excited about this move for two reasons.

First, I think it’s a great idea to separate Google the advertising business from all of these moonshot projects. Instead of projects like Google^[x] being a quirky little team lost in the Google Zoo, it is now an independent entity. Being it’s own company with it’s own leadership will give Google^[x] and it’s corporate siblings will presumably allow more focus, more autonomy, and a better defined mission. These are the exact kinds of things that are important for a team to succeed, and thus for Google’s long term innovative efforts to succeed.

Second, I am very pleased that CEO title of Google is being handed to Sundar Pichai. By extricating themselves from the day-to-day operational management of Google, Larry and Sergey's energy can now be focused on starting new things instead of maintaining and growing their existing business endeavors. The value of this can not be understated. Having one let alone two brilliant, experienced, and extremely well financed individuals focused on creating future instead of meeting expectations on quarterly financial reports is, outside of Elon Musk, almost unheard of. Larry and Sergey will essentially be spending all of their time making a series of audacious bets with billions of dollars of profits. I can’t think of two better people to be tasked with such a job, and can’t wait to see what these two geniuses accomplish in the later half of their careers.

Bravo Google, or as they are now known, Alphabet!