Google Engineers Bound for Benchmark

Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm located on Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road stresses teamwork with a different approach than other CV firms:

Our strategy is to be the first investor in technology-driven companies that seek to create new markets with significant growth potential. We focus on early-stage investing and take a labor-intensive, service-oriented approach in markets where we have direct experience. These include enterprise software and services, communications & security, semiconductors, mobile computing, consumer services and financial services.

According to VentureBeat, Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, are to become the latest “Entrepreneurs in Residence” at Benchmark and are tasked with developing the next big company. As Google high-level engineers they were key players working on GoogleMaps and other projects. Matt Marshall writes “They have a specific idea in mind, but are secretive about it, telling VentureBeat only that it’s a ‘consumer Internet’ company.” We’re accustomed to hearing about folks coming and going from Yahoo!, MSN and ASK, but it’s rarer to hear folks being wooed away from Google. Just last week Vanessa Fox, Google’s liaison to webmasters everywhere through Webmaster Central, announced she’s leaving Google for Zillow, an online real estate service. So is there life post-Google? Robert Cringeley’s article “The Final Days of Google: It is going to be an inside job” posits an interesting hypothesis:

If Google, itself, is to be eventually beaten by some other company, does THAT company yet exist? I don’t think so. But unlike the scenario envisioned by Gates, I have a pretty good idea where we’ll find the founders of that Google-beating start-up. I think they are working right now at Google.

Google is an amazing entrepreneurial petri dish. Yet at the same time, it is doomed to disappoint nearly every entrepreneurial type who works there. This is key: Google is sowing the seeds of its own eventual destruction. It can’t help doing so.

Now we all know that Google takes a Vegas approach to the ideas generated by their employees. What happens at Google stays at Google and they own every scribbled cocktail napkin, hurried post-it note, and whiteboard idea that ever was produced on their Mountain View campus. However, the corporate culture demands that its’ employees continually strive for better, more inventive, more imaginative products and services. So one would imagine that once the Googlers leave the nest they’ll still be bursting with creative innovations and new ideas. Add some financial backing and you have the making of another great company founded by extraordinarily talented people. So look out Jerry and David and Larry and Sergey! There’s a new pair of Stanford grads ready to make a name for themselves!

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