Should Google just become a VC fund? | Hacker News Reader

Should Google just become a VC fund?

carter.sprigings.com

29 pointslikecarter23 comments

> While the information isn’t public, we can safely assume that less than 5%, or 2,954 engineers, work directly or indirectly on Google Ads (Google Search, Youtube, etc.).

Where does this assumption come from? I don't think this is even remotely close to the truth.

Yeah I mean there are probably a thousand people working explicitly and directly on web search alone, not to mention all the auxiliary work that goes into supporting websearch. This assumption is very incorrect.

Yeah it’s a hilariously incorrect article. Even if it were 5% engineers, the article presents it as if all the non-engineers are excess weight that don’t do anything useful.

I think we should explain this more clearly to the original author; it’s probably true that maybe 5% work on ads but that is literally the ads system like Adwords and Adsense. The only reason those are valuable is that Google has tons of traffic and that traffic is driven by the work of the other 95% working on sub-verticals, core search, Youtube, etc.

If you take away the people working on those these services would stagnate and people will start going to another search engine and then you lose revenue.

"Alphabet generated almost $183 billion in revenue. Of that, 147B — over 80% — came from Google’s ads business"

So, the other 20% non-ad revenue (GCP? Google Workspace? Google Play subscriptions?) represents 36.6B

The article however argues that the 6 billion dollar startups would generate 28.5B in value -- so, less than the (supposedly) 95% of non-ad engineers generate right now..?

And this would also mean that there would be nobody left to run and maintain Search, Android, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Drive, GCP, Google's entire infrasructure, ...?

Not to mention, why would 5 google engineers dilute almost 50% right off the bat just to get 1 year of L3 salary?

This is a dumb, provocative question to which the answer is simply ‘no’.

Google Ads is the monetisation of all of the other services Google offers. Everything is a funnel of information to Google's Ad Analytics

Isn't this Google Ventures? (https://www.gv.com/)

Also X and Alphabet itself. As usual for Google they have five copies of the same thing.

They also have a internal startup incubator thing as well called Area 120.

This makes some big assumptions. One, that all the engineers both want and have the skill set to run a startup. Two, that those engineers have that many promising ideas for startups.

In addition to the terrible flaws with this thing that everyone else has pointed out (summary: "all the other stuff google does is necessary for the ads revenue to continue"), isn't this basically what 20% time was? I mean, formally different in that Google kept a 100% stake in anything that was produced that way, but pretty close.

Google’s parent company is still Alphabet, right? Wasn’t Alphabet created to be a pseudo-VC fund for all of the non-core research and development projects that Google had going on?

Alphabet is a holding company. They created Alphabet to stop from having to put everything under the Google name.

CapitalG is their VC fund.

This seems to be riddled with assumptions that suggest a lack of experience with enterprise-sized companies.

Good built an ecosystem of products that capture your attention...so that they can monetize your attention.

They also have Google Cloud, which is quickly converging with all of Google's productivity tools.

Lastlt, why would Google ever exit a business that's generating so much cash?

Google does have it's own internal "VC fund" (Area 120) which has yet to produce anything of significance.

Not a lot of engineers actually want to start their own company, they are happy to just come and engineer new products/services dictated by PMs/leadership/etc.

I'm pretty sure they do want to run their own companies, but they can't afford to lose health insurance and they gotta pay their grossly overpriced mortgages.

I think I regret giving this site traffic.

Thank you for validating my decision not to.

This article also underestimates how quickly you can move with the resources of a large company.

DB management and scaling? Another team takes care of that and offers an easy to use service.

Large pool of server resources to experiment with? Done.

Breaking up entities get rid of this.

<ahem> I think you mean should all of the ridiculously inflated by wall street "platform" companies instead be commercial banks in a less monopolistic actual market economy?

Very interesting points made here.

Those startups can thrive independently under Google

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