Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…So this is January, 2006, the stock falls 27%. Wall Street’s like God, these guys, what are they doing? They’re messing it up. Steven Levy writes in In the Plex that the perception of Google’s ventures beyond search at the time was that the company was tossing balls into the air like a drunken juggler. They were a pure play in investors’ eyes, and now they’re messing it up. They’re adding all these other stuff. They don’t want the other stuff. Then Ben, as you teed up in the intro, the question is why did they do all this? And I think the way to answer it is to start and just tell the stories of all the individual products. Let’s do it. Strap in. I will say, David, doing the research took me way back to early Acquired grading acquisitions. This is the cornucopia of hits of iconic product launches in tech history. The first and probably the most important here because it sets the stage for everything else, the first major non-search product was on April 1st, April Fool’s Day 2004, Gmail. The most famous infamous non-joke April Fool’s Day announcement of all time. But it sure sounded like a joke. Here’s the announcement in 2004. “Entirely web-based email in your browser. You can log in and access it anywhere, on any device. Google search is built-in. You don’t need to spend all this time sorting your mail into folders anymore, and one gigabyte of storage free. No need to delete your mail, no need to clean up your inbox, no need to do anything, ever.” And the whole thing is free. Of course, this sounds like a joke. This is too good to be true.…

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