Life After Google

Wired’s Betsy Schiffman compiled a list of ex-Google employees doing their own start-ups now or joining companies... which may or may not become Google competition. From Vanessa Fox to Kevin Fox, Biz Stone to Evan Williams, Jess Lee and others. An “attack against the mother ship,” as Henry Blodget called it.

Then again, we might find that some of these spaceships may become assimilated, after all – i.e., Google buying those start-ups that turn out to be successful. Or perhaps, any such acquisition may be enough of a demoralizing factor to those who work at Google that it could be risky for Google’s management to consider; it may almost equal telling their employees that the best way to achieve something at Google is to quit Google. (The acquisition of YouTube was already a step in that direction, but still on a more subtle level. While the YouTube acquisition came at the expense of in-house development Google Video as video upload service – the official Google blogs almost entirely switched to YouTube by now when embedding their films – at least YouTube wasn’t spearheaded by ex-Google employees.)

About the author:
Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.

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