Google made $224 billion from ad revenue in 2022, which has helped hide four major cultural problems within the company, according to former Google engineer Praveen Seshadri.
Why we care. Although Seshadri was not a member of the search team, he offers some interesting insights from within Google that may help us understand why Google has been lagging behind Microsoft and OpenAI in the ongoing AI wars – and why Google brought back co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during its “code red” period.
Google’s four cultural problems. Seshadri, who worked at Google for three years, wrote that Google has four cultural problems:
- No mission.
- No urgency.
- Delusions of exceptionalism.
- Mismanagement.
Seshadri wrote these are all “natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called ‘Ads’ that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.” He added:
Not the Google of 10 years ago. I was reminded of the 2013 Founders’ Letter, published by then-CEO Page in May 2013.
Based on what Seshadri wrote (among others), it sounds like Google has drifted away from that 2013 vision Page laid out. Now Google seems to have become what it used to be against, where at least some of its teams are essentially “swimming in molasses.”
While Google is hardly irrelevant in 2023, Google is facing challenges on several fronts. Google’s rushed Bard announcement truly was the opposite of the risk mitigation Seshadri wrote about – and Google employees bashed CEO Sundar Pichai after the launch, calling it “botched”.
Read Seshadri’s article. The maze is in the mouse
