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By CONOR DOUGHERTY I started as The New York Times’s Google beat reporter in August 2014. Shortly thereafter, I told the company’s public relations people that at some point I would love to interview Larry Page, the company’s co-founder. I’ve been waiting ever since. Mr. Page is a fascinating character who has changed the world a few times over and is worth tens of billions of dollars. But he makes little time for the press. He rarely grants interviews, and, when he does, they are usually limited to staged events like TED That presented a big hurdle while I reported on a profile of Mr. Page for Sunday’s paper. He declined several requests for comment on my article, as did a good number of past and present Google employees who have worked closely with him. Before we go any further, I want to say loud and clear that I don’t think Mr. Page or any other business leader has a responsibility to talk to the press. He is a busy man and his media shyness probably should not be confused with reclusion. Mr. Page is visible at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus and regularly talks to the company’s 60,000 employees there and around the world (via videoconference), during the company’s weekly T.G.I.F. gatherings. But companies are run by people, so it is extremely difficult to understand Google without understanding Mr. Page. If you can’t talk to the man himself, the next best thing is to talk to people who have worked with him. As I reported the story, two things kept surfacing. The first was that a number of recently departed Googlers told me that after they gave notice, Mr. Page personally asked them to stay. They said that, during these conversations, he honestly laid out his concerns and aspirations for the company and its future. The second thing was that as I reported the profile — as well as other technology stories — I kept meeting scientists and other researchers who had bumped into Mr. Page at Google’s various academic and scientific gatherings. What these groups had in common was candor. They provided a glimpse, though narrow, into how Mr. Page thinks about technology and Google, which recently reorganized into a holding company called Alphabet. The profile I wrote was hardly an expose, but it helped me — and therefore helped Times readers — get a better understanding about Mr. Page and his company, which has moved far beyond search into self-driving cars, space travel and biotechnology, among other areas. Whenever someone asks me what I do at The Times, and I tell them I cover Google, the result is often a confused stare. “That’s it?” Not really. Our technology group tends to work thematically, meaning that we try to focus on how tech is changing our readers’ work and personal lives. Google is the main focus of my reporting, and it is a brutally competitive beat. It takes me an hour to go through the day’s headlines each morning, and there are dozens of competitors and talented journalists on the tech beat. That means I’m often scooped, and the scrum of daily news can make it hard to see the bigger picture. It’s worth it, though. There’s a strong argument that Google is now the most important company in the world. It is worth $500 billion and is neck and neck with Apple as the most valuable company by market capitalization. Six Google products have more than one billion users. I use Google to research stories, I email my editors through Gmail, and I use Google Maps to go to meetings. Google’s power is unparalleled and partly explains why it and other giant technology companies have faced a bit of cultural backlash in the wake of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents about government spying. Google’s omnipresence is such that it is often hard for me to get away from work. For example, a few weeks after Mr. Page announced the formation of Alphabet, the author Jonathan Franzen published “Purity,” his fifth novel. I read the book for fun, but, as often happens on the Google beat, it quickly turned into work. One of the main characters in Mr. Franzen’s novel is Andreas Wolf, a hacker who has exposed secrets about the East German Stasi and the United States nuclear arsenal, but, during one fictional exchange, refused to publish leaks from two Google employees for fear that the company might use its search engine to tar Mr. Wolf’s reputation. I emailed Mr. Franzen, via a publicist, to see if he might be willing to tell me what kinds of real-world concerns led to that imaginary exchange. “That paragraph came out of the distance between what the N.S.A. was collecting in terms of metadata, basically the Snowden leak, a relatively paltry amount of data compared to the rather large amounts of data we are willingly giving up — or unwillingly giving up by clicking the ‘I accept the terms box’ — to these very powerful corporations,” he said in a phone interview. “And my feeling is, you look around at who is powerful in the world now, and, yes the U.S. government still has drones and a nuclear arsenal — it has some might — but in terms of power over people’s daily lives, I think it’s shifted to the private sector.” Later, he added: “I think it’s appropriate always to resist concentration of power in the hands of too few. There is bound to come a point where that becomes dangerous.” Google’s power is predicated, of course, on the enormous volume of information at its disposal. Its competitors, as I noted in my profile, have accused the company of abusing its dominance in the search space to steer consumers to Google services over theirs, and the European Commission seems to agree. But Mr. Page has also used his own power — through an unusual share structure, he and co-founder Sergey Brin control the company outright — to isolate himself from Wall Street’s demands. In the 16 years I’ve been covering business I have met countless C.E.O.s who describe their jobs in almost academic terms, using phrases like “fiduciary duty” to dodge questions about what kind of role their company has to society. In public comments, Mr. Page goes out of his way to say the opposite, describing Google more in terms of a nonprofit than a gigantic corporation. During a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, he said he wished there were a vehicle for people to donate money to their company so that it could be used for projects that had some kind of social purpose. These are some of the ideas I tried to get at in the article, but of course I would love to have included an interview with the man himself. There is a popular image of reporters as a pack of pushy cold callers who will stalk anyone to get their story, and while that is true at times, I can tell you from experience that it is really awkward and emasculating to try to interview someone who doesn’t want to talk. You feel like a big dork. In total, I have encountered Mr. Page three times for a total of five minutes or so. Once was at an off-the-record gathering where nothing interesting happened, and another was at a press event where he politely shook my hand before heading in another direction. The other time, I was at Google’s Mountain View campus, talking to an executive, when Mr. Page rode up on his bike to say hello to his employee. I introduced myself as a New York Times reporter and he immediately pedaled away. “That went well,” the executive said. It’s not always the most flattering work, but I do believe it’s important.
Three years ago, Charles Chase, an engineer who manages Lockheed Martin’s nuclear fusion program, was sitting on a white leather couch at Google’s Solve for X conference when a man he had never met knelt down to talk to him.
They spent 20 minutes discussing how much time, money and technology separated humanity from a sustainable fusion reaction — that is, how to produce clean energy by mimicking the sun’s power — before Mr. Chase thought to ask the man his name.
“He didn’t have any sort of pretension like he shouldn’t be talking to me or ‘Don’t you know who you’re talking to?’” Mr. Chase said. “We just talked.”
Larry Page is not a typical chief executive, and in many of the most visible ways, he is not a C.E.O. at all. Corporate leaders tend to spend a good deal of time talking at investor conferences or introducing new products on auditorium stages. Mr. Page, who is 42, has not been on an earnings call since 2013, and the best way to find him at Google I/O — an annual gathering where the company unveils new products — is to ignore the main stage and follow the scrum of fans and autograph seekers who mob him in the moments he steps outside closed doors.
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A prototype for a car Google is developing.CreditGoogle
But just because he has faded from public view does not mean he is a recluse. He is a regular at robotics conferences and intellectual gatherings like TED. Scientists say he is a good bet to attend Google’s various academic gatherings, like Solve for X and Sci Foo Camp, where he can be found having casual conversations about technology or giving advice to entrepreneurs.
Mr. Page is hardly the first Silicon Valley chief with a case of intellectual wanderlust, but unlike most of his peers, he has invested far beyond his company’s core business and in many ways has made it a reflection of his personal fascinations.
He intends to push even further with Alphabet, a holding company that separates Google’s various cash-rich advertising businesses from the list of speculative projects like self-driving cars that capture the imagination but do not make much money. Alphabet companies and investments span disciplines from biotechnology to energy generation to space travel to artificial intelligence to urban planning.
Investors will get a good look at the scope of those ambitions on Feb. 1, when the company, in its fourth-quarter earnings report, will disclose for the first time the costs and income of the collection of projects outside of Google’s core business.
As chief executive of Alphabet, Mr. Page is tasked with figuring how to spin Google’s billions in advertising profits into new companies and industries. When he announced the reorganization last summer, he said that he and Sergey Brin, Google’s other founder, would do this by finding new people and technologies to invest in, while at the same time slimming down Google — now called Google Inc., a subsidiary of Alphabet — so their leaders would have more autonomy.
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Sundar Pichai, chief of Google Inc.CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
“In general, our model is to have a strong C.E.O. who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to investors. He said that he and Mr. Brin would be responsible for picking those chief executives, monitoring their progress and determining their pay.
Google’s day-to-day management was left to Sundar Pichai, the company’s new chief executive. His job will not be about preventing cancer or launching rocket ships, but to keep Google’s advertising machine humming, to keep innovating in emerging areas like machine learning and virtual reality — all while steering the company through a thicket of regulatory troubles that could drag on for years.
Mr. Page’s new role is part talent scout and part technology visionary. He still has to find the chief executives of many of the other Alphabet businesses.
And he has said on several occasions that he spends a good deal of time researching new technologies, focusing on what kind of financial or logistic hurdles stand in the way of them being invented or carried out.
His presence at technology events, while just a sliver of his time, is indicative of a giant idea-scouting mission that has in some sense been going on for years but is now Mr. Page’s main job.
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Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, wearing Google Glass.CreditCarlo Allegri/Reuters
In the investor letter, he put it this way: “Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things.”
An Interest in Cool Things
Mr. Page has always had a wide range of interests. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he worked on solar cars, music synthesizers and once proposed that the school build a tram through campus. He arrived at Stanford’s computer science doctorate program in 1995, and had a list of initial research ideas, including self-driving cars and using the web’s many hyperlinks to improve Internet search. His thesis adviser, Terry Winograd, steered him toward search.
“Even before he came to Stanford he was interested in cool technical things that could be done,” Mr. Winograd said. “What makes something interesting for him is a big technical challenge. It’s not so much where it’s headed but what the ride is like.”
Inside Google, Mr. Page is known for asking a lot of questions about how people do their jobs and challenging their assumptions about why things are as they are. In an interview at the Fortune Global Forum last year, Mr. Page said he enjoyed talking to people who ran the company’s data centers.
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LinkNYC Wi-Fi consoles, a product of Sidewalk Labs, a company owned by Google.CreditCole Wilson for The New York Times
“I ask them, like, ‘How does the transformer work?’ ‘How does the power come in?’ ‘What do we pay for that?’” he said. “And I’m thinking about it kind of both as an entrepreneur and as a business person. And I’m thinking ‘What are those opportunities?’”
Another question he likes to ask: “Why can’t this be bigger?”
Mr. Page declined multiple requests for comment, and many of the people who spoke about him requested anonymity because they were not supposed to talk about internal company matters.
Many former Google employees who have worked directly with Mr. Page said his managerial modus operandi was to take new technologies or product ideas and generalize them to as many areas as possible. Why can’t Google Now, Google’s predictive search tool, be used to predict everything about a person’s life? Why create a portal to shop for insurance when you can create a portal to shop for every product in the world?
But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.
Google: search, advertising, maps, YouTube and Android.
Calico, an anti-aging biotech company
Sidewalk, a company focused on smart cities
Nest, a maker of Internet-connected devices for the home
Fiber, high-speed Internet service in a number of American cities
Investment arms, such as Google Ventures and Google Capital
Incubator projects, such as Google X, which is developing self-driving cars and delivery drones
Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.
It will also rid his office of the kind of dull-but-necessary annoyances of running a major corporation. Several recently departed Google staff members said that as chief executive of Google, Mr. Page had found himself in the middle of various turf wars, like how to integrate Google Plus, the company’s struggling social media effort, with other products like YouTube, or where to put Google Now, which resided in the Android team but was moved to the search group.
Such disputes are a big reason Mr. Page had been shedding managerial duties and delegating the bulk of his product oversight to Mr. Pichai, these people said. In a 2014 memo to the company announcing Mr. Pichai’s promotion to product chief, Mr. Page said the move would allow him to “focus on the bigger picture” at Google and have more time to get the company’s next generation of big bets off the ground.
People who have worked with Mr. Page say that he tries to guard his calendar, avoiding back-to-back meetings and leaving time to read, research and see new technologies that interest him.
Given that he is worth in the neighborhood of $40 billion and created the world’s most famous website, Mr. Page has the tendency to attract a crowd when he attends technology events. At last year’s Darpa Robotics Challenge, he was trailed closely by a handler who at times acted as a buffer between Mr. Page and would-be cellphone photographers. That commotion could annoy anyone, but it is particularly troubling for Mr. Page, who, because of damaged vocal cords, speaks just above a whisper and sometimes uses a microphone in small meetings.
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A Project Loon balloon.CreditGoogle
At home in Palo Alto, Mr. Page tries to have the most normal life possible, driving his children to school or taking his family to local street fairs, according to people who know him or have seen him at such events.
And at Google, even events that are decidedly not normal aspire to a kind of casualness. Take the Camp, an exclusive and secretive event that Google holds at a resort in Sicily and where invitees have included Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and Tory Burch, the fashion designer.
One attendee, who asked to remain anonymous because guests were not supposed to discuss the gathering, recalls being surprised by how much time Mr. Page spent with his children.
In public remarks, Mr. Page has said how important his father, Carl V. Page, a computer science professor at Michigan State University who died in 1996, was to his choice of career.
“My dad was really interested in technology,” Mr. Page said at Google I/O in 2013, the last time he took the stage at the event. “He actually drove me and my family all the way across the country to go to a robotics conference. And then we got there and he thought it was so important that his young son go to the conference, one of the few times I’ve seen him really argue with someone to get in someone underage successfully into the conference, and that was me.”
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A Nest thermostat.
People who work with Mr. Page or have spoken with him at conferences say he tries his best to blend in, and, for the most part, the smaller groups of handpicked attendees at Google’s academic and science gatherings, tend to treat him like a peer.
The scope of his curiosity was apparent at Sci Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only conference that is sponsored by Google, O’Reilly Media and Digital Science.
The largely unstructured “unconference” begins when each of its attendees — an eclectic batch of astronomers, psychologists, physicists and others — write something that interests them on a small card and then paste it to a communal wall. Those notes become the basis for breakout talks on topics like scientific ethics or artificial intelligence.
The last conference was held during a weekend in June on Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus, and Mr. Page was there for most of it. He did not host or give a speech, but mingled and went to talks, just like everyone else. That impressed investors and computer scientists who did not expect to see so much of him, but researchers who had come from outside Silicon Valley barely noticed.
“I have a vague memory that some founder type person was walking through the crowd,” said Josh Peek, an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
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A contact lens with a wireless chip.CreditGoogle
Another benefit of these gatherings for the reserved Mr. Page is that they are mostly closed to the news media.
A Forward Thinker
When Mr. Page does talk in public, he tends to focus on optimistic pronouncements about the future and Google’s desire to help humanity. Asked about current issues, like how mobile apps are challenging the web or how ad blockers are affecting Google’s business, he tends to dismiss it with something like, “People have been talking about that for a long time.”
Lately, he has talked more about his belief that for-profit companies can be a force for social good and change. During a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, Mr. Page said that instead of a nonprofit or philanthropic organization, he would rather leave his money to an entrepreneur like Mr. Musk.
Of course, for every statement Mr. Page makes about Alphabet’s technocorporate benevolence, you can find many competitors and privacy advocates holding their noses in disgust. Technology companies like Yelp have accused the company of acting like a brutal monopolist that is using the dominance of its search engine to steer consumers toward Google services, even if that means giving the customers inferior information.
Financially speaking, Mr. Page is leaving his chief executive job at Google at a time when things could not be better. The company’s revenuecontinues to grow about 20 percent a year, an impressive figure for any business, but particularly so for one that is on pace to generate approximately $60 billion this year.
In fact, the company’s main business issue seems to be that it is doing too well. Google is facing antitrust charges in Europe, along with investigations in Europe and the United States. Those issues are now mostly Mr. Pichai’s to worry about, as Mr. Page is out looking for the next big thing.
It is hard to imagine how even the most ambitious person could hope to revolutionize so many industries. And Mr. Page, no matter how smart, cannot possibly be an expert in every area Alphabet wants to touch.
His method is not overly technical. Instead, he tends to focus on how to make a sizable business out of whatever problem this or that technology might solve. Leslie Dewan, a nuclear engineer who founded a company that is trying to generate cheap electricity from nuclear waste, also had a brief conversation with Mr. Page at the Solve For X conference.
She said he questioned her on things like modular manufacturing and how to find the right employees.
“He doesn’t have a nuclear background, but he knew the right questions to ask,” said Dr. Dewan, chief executive of Transatomic Power. “‘Have you thought about approaching the manufacturing in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about the vertical integration of the company in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about training the work force this way?’ They weren’t nuclear physics questions, but they were extremely thoughtful ways to think about how we could structure the business.”
Dr. Dewan said Mr. Page even gave her an idea for a new market opportunity that she had not thought of. Asked to be more specific, she refused. The idea was too good to share.
Alphabet could soon become the most valuable company in the world. The Google powerhouse traded on Friday morning with an equity value above $500 billion, less than 10 percent shy of Apple’s value. Investors value the search firm’s earnings from rapidly growing digital advertising more than twice as highly as Apple’s in a saturating smartphone market. Wall Street, however, may be overlooking Alphabet’s risks. Global smartphone sales growth slowed to 10 percent last year, according to the consulting firm IDC. Reports of cutbacks at Apple suppliers suggest tepid demand for its latest phones. Analysts fear that the company may struggle this year to match the 230 million or so iPhones sold in the last fiscal year to September. An oversupplied market could bring price wars, which could hurt margins — and the iPhone accounts for about 60 percent of Apple’s revenue and a bigger chunk of its profit. As a result, investors expect little growth in the company’s top line this year and are paying only about 10 times estimated 2016 earnings for the stock. The mobile digital advertising market, meanwhile, should almost triple to nearly $200 billion globally by 2019, consultants at eMarketer reckon. Alphabet’s sales are forecast to grow about 15 percent this year. This wind at Alphabet’s back and the possibility that its self-driving cars, robots or medical endeavors will pay off help explain why it commands a price-to-earnings multiple above 20. A subpar earnings report from Apple next week, or a strong one from Alphabet the week after, could bring a new name to the top of the world’s most valuable companies list. Investors are, however, prone to overconfidence in technology trends. Facebook is snagging more and more ad dollars. European antitrust authorities are circling. Moreover, some of Alphabet’s revenue comes courtesy of iPhone users: it cost Google $1 billion in 2014 to keep its search bar on the Apple device, Bloomberg reports based on transcripts of a court case. Alphabet is far more reliant on Internet advertising than Apple is on the iPhone. Ads bring in about 90 percent of the company’s revenue. Any hint of investor skepticism about that market could keep Apple at the top of the list. Robert Cyran is a columnist for Reuters Breakingviews. For more independent commentary and analysis, visit breakingviews.com.
Google had a big 2015: It changed its logo, divvied up its business into startups like Sidewalk, Calico, X, Fiber, and consolidated all those companies into one brand named Alphabet. Now Alphabet is very, very close to being named the world’s most valuable company—yes, more valuable than Apple.
The suite of companies that now form Google’s overarching powerbrand has been doing very well, and was valued today at over $500 billion, nearly closing the gap with its Silicon Valley rival Apple. Meanwhile, Apple has not been doing as hot. Humans simply are not buying phones like they used to, which could destroy Apple, since the company relies on iPhone sales for more than half of its revenue.
Meanwhile, what does Alphabet have going for it? Well, Google (and I meant the original Google) is still the king of advertising, of course, even when it masquerades as an “urban think tank,” and Alphabet’s offerings are heralding a new age of autonomous vehicles, secret robots, and scary-fast internet. 2016 will be another great year for Alphabet. It might not be that good for Apple at all.
If this indeed happens, and Google ends up ascending to the top spot in all the land, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the new ruler of Earth, Larry Page. In a sprawling New York Times profile (for which Page himself refused to comment), the co-founder and CEO is portrayed as a chill dude who mixes it up with non-billionaires:
Larry Page is not a typical chief executive, and in many of the most visible ways, he is not a C.E.O. at all. Corporate leaders tend to spend a good deal of time talking at investor conferences or introducing new products on auditorium stages. Mr. Page, who is 42, has not been on an earnings call since 2013, and the best way to find him at Google I/O — an annual gathering where the company unveils new products — is to ignore the main stage and follow the scrum of fans and autograph seekers who mob him in the moments he steps outside closed doors.
Just a regular guy running the most valuable company ever.
