Sergey Brin and Larry Page have found a way to retain voting control at a $200+ billion company while keeping the shareholders happy. Funny how huge profits will do that for a leader.
Brin and Page have certainly earned the right to continue to lead this company. Not much good can come from a multi-layered organization where every layer has input into decisions of the company. The organization where there is clear leadership, who will listen to feedback, and make their own decisions is generally going to operate best.
Obviously the leader cannot be just anyone. There is a special type. Look at Bill Gates and then follow that up with Steve Ballmer. Gates was the clear leader with a vision and an grip on the company. The company flourished. Ballmer has had a bit of struggle in comparison. Perhaps it is not a fair comparison. It could be said that Gates rode off into the sunset due to the fact that his company was far behind in the future growth areas. However, you cannot argue with the track record of Bill Gates. He dominated like Michael Jordan.
Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are also examples of the strong leader who retains that grip on the company. It is amazing what Steve Jobs was able to do with Apple and Pixar. Zuckerberg deserves a lot of credit, but the company is still very young. He was brilliant enough to retain voting rights to shares that the company sold to investors such as Digital Sky Technologies (Yuri Millner). He controls the voting rights to those shares. By doing so, Mark has the final say and probably the initial say regarding product, design, and direction. In fact, many say that the Instagram deal was purely Mark Zuckerberg’s doing. 24 hours after receiving funding at a $500m valuation, Zuckerberg agreed to pay $1b. Investors must have been celebrating that night. Mark probably owed someone a favor. Done!
Larry and Sergey continue to innovate and bring new products to market. Google could be an entirely different company in 10 years. Search, as we know it, might not exist and the projects that Sergey is working on might just be the future of Google. Google’s self driving car, Google Green/Energy, Google Glass (glasses). Time will tell.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc announced a stock split designed to preserve the control of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin over the world’s No. 1 Web search engine, asking investors to trust their long-term vision.
