You don't have to get a job at another company. You could also start your own.
(edit) Why am I at -1? Balmer is a more reasonable match for Bill, but he is not a founder. Jobs is a better fit, but it is odd to see him paired with Gates.
*except almost all the ones that get talked about here every day.
I've been under the impression that the few that have had successful exits were bought by Google itself, mostly as talent acquisitions.
Among startups we've funded, I know at least Greplin, Optimizely, Appjet, and ReMail have/had founders who previously worked at Google. I'm sure there are at least that many more, but I don't remember where most of the people we funded worked before.
I guess Biz Stone came directly from Google to found Twitter.
Given Google's size and the quality of the people who go in there, I'd have expected dozens if not hundreds of companies to be spawned by ex-Googlers.
I often wonder if certain companies simply produce more founders because of culture, money or simply bias in who they hire. PayPal is the classic example of a company that pumped out a good number of successful founders, but I can't identify any particular characteristic of that particular company that might have caused it.
I'd love to see some analytics about where the most successful or prolific founders come from.
Google may have very good technical people, i.e. they are capable, but I am not sure how they would fare as "leaders", "influencers", etc... it's also a company culture thing. If your company does not promote that kind of behavior, it is very unlikely you will see people stepping out to try things on their own. And if Google is successful at making their employees happy in some way or another, that also puts the barrier of leaving Google to a much higher point.
I've known plenty of really sharp, talented developers that have zero interest in ever even looking at a P&L sheet.
When you've immersed yourself in a certain sub-culture (say startups), it's sometimes easy to forget that not everyone out there shares that model of thinking.
Anyway, I'm an ex-Googler who started a company after leaving. It's still too early to say whether we'll be "successful" by any metric, but I'm really enjoying it so far, which is enough for now.
Largely depends, I suspect, on the level of VC involvement. Most (all?) would be looking for a big-money exit in the future- just ticking along nicely means their bet doesn't pay off so well.
It took me quite a while to come to this conclusion though and I still wonder if I'm missing something obvious. :-)
They're still in beta so perhaps it's premature to call it a success story, but it looks promising.
Larry certainly does seem to have take Steve Jobs admonishment to heart. Which can give a company tremendous focus. Its an interesting time.
I used to remind people at the Googleplex that they were walking around in SGI's tomb. I found that was rarely appreciated :-)
So here is that challenge for this decade: Leave Google and kill Hollywood. Seems like a reasonable goal to me.