Mirror: https://archive.is/DfNpk
Googler, opinions are my own.
This was an ambitious product. It was lead by Caesar Sengupta, who left back in March. Without the project's primary driver, it got killed off (at least before it launched).
If it was a good product, Google should restaff the project. If it was not a good product, Google should seriously rethink the autonomy it gives staff to decide to launch new products.
It would be bad if they used this strategy for every employee, but for certain employees, notably, those who are likely to go found their own startups, it can be a great idea. Google gets the potential to finance a "startup" for a fraction of the hypothetical acquisition costs, and the downside is paying the salary of a few dead weights if the produce never takes off.
But when Google decides to put their main brand behind something, announce it to the world, start collecting signups, only to shut it down, that ends up continuing to burn the company's reputation. In this case, it also represented a significant partnership with a major bank, which may have burned some bridges along the way.
And bear in mind, in this case, it sounds like this VP had 3,700 employees under him... hardly a trivial cost of all the wasted effort.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/next-billion-users-head-ca...
Google has never heard of single points of failure? Strange. Is this how all of your products are run, in that if the "head" of the project leaves/gets ill/dies the whole thing just vaporizes?
It is actually very common for new business ideas to live or die based on the support from one senior executive - I saw this from the inside at Fujitsu, Oracle, Sun and Google, and at many partner companies from the outside.
In a new business line at an established large company, there is almost always another business line executive's toes you are going to step on.
For example, making computer hardware at Oracle steps on the toes of Oracle people selling to computer hardware makers. Shifting to open source steps on toes of internal developers and existing suppliers.
It takes a executive support to maintain these kinds of programs until the expected gain can be evaluated fairly against than the risks.
If a key executive leaves there is quite often blow back on their pet projects. From the perspective "outside the room" it is frequently unclear whether the exec was just moving on, fighting to the end, or saw the writing on the wall and left while the leaving was good.