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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

What prompted the pay rise? I thought he wasn’t doing a good job over the last few years

> What prompted the pay rise? I thought he wasn’t doing a good job over the last few years

If the board / shareholders thought that, they would vote/advocate for his ouster.

In 2015, when he became CEO, Google's annual revenue was just over $74B. In 2022, it was just shy of $280B. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

You can look at other metrics too to understand why shareholders, the board, and Larry & Sergey think he's the best person to lead Google.

If the board is just looking at stock and shareholder returns, they are doing a disservice to google. The company is at a critical juncture, it has matured and no longer that young/hip company it used to be. Employee morale is low, GCP is underperforming and Microsoft is eating their lunch. Search has plateaued and their devices are just average. What is going to give them the next 20yrs of growth? All I see is ade about google certified courses for people. I am not even talking about AI or their utter incapacity to productize either AI or self driving tech. Sundar has failed on all fronts if he has just maintained the status quo

Perhaps because that's what you thought. Google's shareholder/board thought CEO is doing great job.

Ignore HN commenters and look at the performance of Google stock since the day Sundar took over. He is doing a fantastic job for shareholders.

Oh please; you have no way to prove Google’s stock price is due to Sundar or a global trend to pivot into exploration of technology.

Billions are spent each year marketing the value of tech. Fiat economics are not immutable laws of reality but populist memes. Valuations have no real tether to reality except what a bunch of apes can be convinced to believe in.

Religious memes of high fathers and endless human expansion seem deeply rooted into the human condition after centuries of being forced to drink such kool aid.

Pretty silly metric to judge ceo on. Also in last 5y their stock is only up ~100% which is not that great compared to competition

That is literally the top metric CEOs are judged on. And Google has outperformed S&P 500 (aka the competition) by ~300% in his tenure.

> That is literally the top metric CEOs are judged on

Says you. On his watch they completely squandered their ai lead (despite rebranding as AI company or whatever), didn’t gain much share in the cloud and, botched gaming and messaging, am I missing something? Oh right, also continued to burn user trust and alienating employees it seems

Look at apple and microsoft for comparison, not rando s&p companies.

Google could have conquered the whole world. But instead they settled for growing 14% each year since 2015 while the average enterprise charnel house grew 9%. Worst part is they had to decimate their workers and burn most of their social capital just to get that. Meanwhile their core product search has become a legacy technology used by people who haven't heard of OpenAI, a company that's capitalizing on Google's inventions and discoveries which it didn't have the cojones to productionize itself.

No, that’s not correct. He’s slightly ahead of nasdaq during his tenure [0]

[0] https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/NDAQ/interactive-char...

Did you mean to link to some index? You linked to the stock of Nasdaq the stock exchange. I'm not sure what the point of comparing the stock price of a stock exchange with Google is, why not Tesla or Walmart or GE?

I meant to link to the comparison of nasdaq vs goog. But the link didn’t come across with the way I cut and pasted. An error on my part.

If you click compare and put in goog, you’ll see two price lines.

The point of this comparison is that any random stock on nasdaq is likely to follow the index. So good managers should be able to outperform an index of similar stocks.

So, I as an investor am interested in companies that outperform their peers.

I think it would be better to compare goog to a better, more tech index but I don’t know one.

But this link answers “is google better to invest in than a random Nasdaq stock?” And infers that the stock performance is influenced by the CEO. So evaluating Goog’s CEO based on stock price seems to show that he didn’t do that well.

FWIW, GP was saying you linked to the stock price of Nasdaq Inc, the company (yes, Nasdaq is a company that hosts a stock exchange!), instead of the Nasdaq Index, which is what this thread was discussing.

The Google stock price has matched the NASDAQ100 since then, it's underperformed when you take dividends into account. He's made a lot of money for shareholders, but you'd have to say his performance is average or slightly below.

> The Google stock price has matched the NASDAQ100 since then

Google is in the NASDAQ100 and it's the third largest company in it. Google matches the NASDAQ100's performance because the NASDAQ100 is largely a measure of Google's performance.

I don't get your point. The index is mostly non Google companies, and has returns matching Google's share price. Hence the other index components have had share price movements comparable to Google. So judged by share price alone Sundar has had a performance on par with the average CEO of the other companies in that index.

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