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Comment by Aloisius | Hacker News Reader

Hrm. AppJet and ReMail were both acquired by Google though. Greplin and Optimizely Googlers both had years at other companies between Google and the founding their companies.

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.

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A minor observation corroborating your hypothesis is looking at how many people Google's accumulated from the old Bell Labs (Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, etc.). In some ways the Bell Labs culture was the diametric opposite of startup culture, with a typical career path of "stay in this job for life", and little interest in business or striking out on your own. I believe a few have said as much, that they moved to Google because it was a place where they had the resources and freedom to just focus on technology.

I was going to make the same comment.

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.

From what I understand, turnover at Google is very low, especially among high ranking engineers. That might be why you see fewer ex-Googler startups than one might expect.

FWIW, Greplin's cofounder (Robby Walker) went straight from Google to Greplin. Although, to be fair, his last startup was acqui-hired by Google too.

I don't know so much about Google employees, but what defines usually the capability of good entrepreneurs is that they are pied off with something in their environment, and have the will, leadership and capability to change things for the better.

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.

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