October 11, 2007 | Thursday

London Office: 55 New Oxford Street, London, WC1A 1BS, UK / Tel: 020 7952 8000 / Fax: 020 7952 8001
Cheshire Office: Mandarin Court, Warrington, Cheshire, WA1 1GG, England UK / Tel: 01925 413513 / Fax: 01925 420118

Google and the painful flipside of hitting $600/share

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Search Engines |Google |Search Expertise

I blogged last week about the HR and retention headaches being experienced by the search engines. I blogged earlier this week about Google’s new milestone in share prices. In a matter of days, the two issues have clashed in a most unfortunate way for the search giant.

Remember what Fake Steve Jobs said recently?

Not so well-kept secret in the Valley is that Google is freaking out because a lot of its folks are vesting soon and these greedy, restless b*st*rds are looking for the next Big Score and right now that’s looking like Facebook. So lots of Google talent is going to be streaming out the door to Facebook and all the free bus rides in the world aren’t going to keep them locked in.

As it turns out, that $600 share price means that many of those talented people aren’t feeling the need to wait for their shares to vest. Case in point: Benjamin Ling, an engineer who has long been known as one of “Larry and Sergey’s golden boys”. He’s jumping ship for that most popular destination of ex-Googlers: Facebook.

This is a trend I noted back in July, and in August, high-profile YouTube Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu also left Google for Facebook (where he is now CFO). Many others in less visible roles have defected in the meantime.

With Facebook rumoured to be IPO-bound, it’s anyone’s guess how much these search geeks are going to be worth in the near future. What should be scaring Google - and Facebook, as this nightmare may soon be theirs - is how much value leaves their company when they go. (Do you have an algorithm for calculating that yet, guys?)