John Battelle Talks to Omid Kordestani at Web 2.0
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Written By Reprise Media | October 6, 2005 | Share This
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The Web 2.0 train keeps rolling along with these highlights from web maestro John Battelle’s talk with Google’s senior VP of worldwide sales and field operations Omid Kordestani.
Battelle: Did you have a sense of what this company [Google] would turn into?
Kordestani: I learned a lot at Netscape that could be applied to Google. I wanted to build a company that would last. We could have sold the company, but decided to focus on the end-user instead.
(Omid then went on to say that he knew that the passion he saw in Larry and Sergey was such that it didn’t matter what they were building. He said that if it were mattresses, they’d build the greatest mattress in the world.)
Battelle: Lots of new announcements converging on Microsoft. Given the experience with Netscape, do you think about that as Google makes new announcements every other day?
Kordestani: The business model works. Google is obsessive about users & services. Part of the culture is to focus on new ideas but learn from the past. We’ll only fail if we fail our users. Google is not focused on competitors.
(After further pressuring by Battelle on who keeps them up at night, Kordestani said that “We’ll fail if we focus on Microsoft or anyone else.)
Battelle: Your S-1 filing seemed to be giving the finger to Wall Street, no guidance, etc. How is it going? Do you feel the financial pressure?
Kordestani: At Netscape we were tied to meeting numbers. Our CFO would wander around on the final day of a quarter waiting for a deal to close. We didn’t want the Google business model to be the same way.
(He went on to emphasize that Google’s business will be built around things that can be proven scientifically, so that things can be more predictable. They look at every pixel and every user action. Even still there is pressure. He said “We felt the pressure all along (before the IPO).”
Some other random, but but interesting comments:
Omid on Google Getting Better: Despite their success, Omid believes Google is just getting going. He said Larry Page still doesn’t think Google works very well.
Battelle on The Google Barnacles: He brought up an interesting point towards the end of the interview, that a lot of businesses just “plug into google” as their revenue stream until they figure something else out. This is clearly another case of the Googlization of Business: Start-ups find a cool service, plug in Google and make some money. In fact, many of the 13 companies we saw launched at the conference indicated that they planned on making money in this manner.
Omid on Google as Bad Guy: When asked by Battelle whether Google is stifling innovation, Kordestani replied that they “we don’t want to be a gorilla” and went on to say that he knows from their VC’s and others around the Valley that innovation is at a high and people are investing in companies again, so he doesn’t think that Google is preventing growth in the market. Our take: they are clearly a competitive threat to any business, since they consistently disrupt models, but they do offer a revenue stream for people (as noted above), so there may be a netzero effect. In the end, they are a platform that people are building on top of, around and under.
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