David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Messaging probably I bet in a Nonplus world, WhatsApp, something like that could be owned by Google. Two things. One is messaging. Totally missed messaging. When I was a business school student at Stanford, Eric was now executive chairman and he started co-teaching a class at GSP. I took his class. I was one of his students during these years. It was awesome. It was one of the best classes I ever took. The quarter when I was taking the class was when Facebook bought WhatsApp. I remember Eric coming into class right after it happened and just being like, God, we missed it. We totally missed it. That’s because Google was distracted, that was one thing. Then I realized the other as bigger or bigger thing is cloud Google should have been massively investing in cloud. There are all sorts of reasons that they didn’t, we’re going to save this for the next episode. But I was like, yeah, especially think about where the impetus for this came from, from [inaudible 03:30:20] from this memo. The [inaudible 03:30:22] memo, as it’s known [inaudible 03:30:24] should have been focused on Cloud. He should not have been focused on social. Google had the wrong strategy in Cloud for many years and as a result, that’s why their Cloud business is way behind Amazon and Microsoft. And maybe they turned some talent, maybe there was some good people that got burned by the culture souring. You could argue this destroyed product velocity. People complain today that Google’s always working on really interesting technology and they just never get cool products out the door.…

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