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Published · transcript-backed

Ben Gilbert: belief

26 Aug 2025 Acquired Google Part II: Alphabet

“I think that the strategy was pretty tight at the top level and they just didn’t actually need to communicate it down very far.”

— Ben Gilbert

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Ben Gilbert
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
26 Aug 2025
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…It was so interesting doing the research for this episode because so many of the people we talked to, even people who were leaders of a lot of these products, because Google was so decentralized and so siloed, they were focused on their thing on Android or Chrome, whatever. We'd ask what was the overall strategy? What was the through line to all of this? And we kept getting answers like, well it was just googly. People worked on what they thought was cool and it was good for the web. That is absolutely true. But there was this all overlay of this very, very thin layer of strategy that held the whole web together. I think that the strategy was pretty tight at the top level and they just didn’t actually need to communicate it down very far. Most people that I talked to said, I don’t know, I was just trying to build great products that people love. Right. I think it was a feature, not a bug. Is what I’m saying, that it didn’t communicate down because it let the teams below build really, really great products.…

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