Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It’s also amazing how much that mission statement scaled. I was going to save this for way later in analysis, but organize the world’s information. Not too broad, not too narrow, in many ways altruistic to attract the right type of talent that you want, but also one that lends itself to tremendous monetization. If you’re going to organize the world’s information and you have a bunch of smart people, you are going to be able to create a money printing machine based on organizing the world’s information. They actually have a great quote in their IPO prospectus. “We believe that the most effective and ultimately the most profitable way to accomplish our mission is to put the needs of our users first. ” (a) There’s this almost a trifecta of wonderfully-altruistic sounding mission, that (b) lends itself to this incredible monetization model, (c) as long as we’re putting the needs of our users first. And I think Eric really bought into this because it was a risk. Even though he joined Google in 2001 and a lot of these portal deals were already underway, the Yahoo portal deal had already happened, it wasn’t clear that Google was going to be a smash hit home run. I think it was clear that it was going to survive, and they had enough revenue and they could be profitable. But we’re talking about somebody who’s the CEO of a public company,…

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