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Comment by kprobst | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people thought that somehow a publicly traded corporation was going to behave forever in the same way as a garage startup. Once Google reached a certain size, a certain revenue level, and became beholden to institutional shareholders plus (in this case) found itself in a position of largely uncontested market control, I think it was inevitable that it would turn into the all too familiar caricature of a corporation.

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While I'm not really surprised, I think I did expect somewhat more idealistic guidance from the top, especially considering that the founders still own solidly controlling stakes of the company. They can't run it as a charity or anything, but there are many different possible trajectories a company can take within the parameters possible for a public company, and a strong founder/owner/executive team can choose some over others.

It's hard to tell what really happens from the outside, but Google's founders don't seem to have maintained as strong a hands-on role in company direction/culture/decisions as, say, Microsoft in its Gates-led years.

Don't Sergey and Brin have 10x voting rights? I was under the impression that common shareholders couldn't do a darn thing to them.

Yes, assuming things haven't changed since 2007:

In particular, as of December 31, 2007, our two founders and our CEO, Larry, Sergey and Eric, owned approximately 88% of our outstanding Class B common stock, representing approximately 67% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock.

https://investor.google.com/documents/2007_Google_AnnualRepo...

The problem is its not just who has the most votes, but in the US, companies have a legal obligation to do what is in the best interest of the shareholders (even minority shareholders) over all other claimants.

California just created a new corporation type that allows 'public benefit' to take precedence over shareholder interest:

http://www.alston.com/environmentalandlandblog/?entry=4488

no they do not. not only is this not established in law (in fact, congress has made it harder for civil suits to be filed), they are almost never brought unless there has been a large drop in stock price (not for tepid or slower-than-desired growth), the ones that are brought are usually dismissed, and the ones that are not dismissed are almost universally settled.

take a look at, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule

Perhaps, but it's still such a widely held belief among businesspeople and shareholders that it's probably not a battle that would be wise to pick (very often).

Read the IPO letter to investors. They have two classes of voting shares, like Berkshire Hathaway, which enables them to make longer term bets than the market's attention span can handle.

True, it's a similar deal.

A bit less drastic, as a 'second-class' Google stock is just 1/10th of the vote, whereas a 'second-class' berk is 1/20th (25th?, dunno) of the vote, but more importantly doesn't cost 100k/share. I don't know what berk b's price is at, but there's a much smaller set of people who can actually buy berk a shares. 100k is a lot for the average joe to invest in a single share :(

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