GoogleGazer

CNN quotes Fortune Magazine which raises a concern that Google, voted one of the top employers in the country, is steadily losing staff. Sean Knapp, together with Belsasar Lepe and Bismarck Lepe left  successful careers at Google and a bucketful of unvested options to found Ooyala, which focuses on building video syndication and monetization solutions for the distribution of high quality video content. They have already attracted $10 million in funding. ( Ooyala means cradle in Telugu, a Southern Indian language, in case you were wondering).

They are not the only ones who headed for the exit doors.

Paul Buchheit, an early Google engineer who coined the oft-repeated  “Don’t be evil!” battle cry, is a founder, with three ex-Google colleagues, of a social-networking company called FriendFeed, which enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. and to to discover and discuss information among friends. Yanda Erlich, once a popular Google product manager, started an instant-messaging company called Mogad, which lets you chat with all your Facebook friends from one IM client. Nathan Stoll, who managed Google News, is hard at work on his new company, Mechanical Zoo. (It’s in “stealth mode”- so few details are known.) Former business-development guys Salman Ullah and Sean Dempsey have a new venture capital firm, Merus Capital, that aims in part to fund startups founded by ex-Googler employees. The departures have grown so numerous that the exiles have formed an informal alumni club of ex-Googlers turned entrepreneurs. David Friedberg, another former biz-dev executive, started a company called WeatherBill, which sells insurance pegged to climate risks (nicely profiled in TechCrunch). He recently attended the club’s first meeting at a conference center in Palo Alto. “I was surprised by the number of things that were being done that could have been done at Google,” he says.

There’s been an exodus of executive talent too: Its chief information officer, Douglas Merrill, just left. Several top people have gone to Facebook, most notably Sheryl Sandberg, who ran Google’s automated ad sales, and Elliot Schrage, who ran PR. George Reyes, Google’s CFO, announced his retirement last summer and has yet to be replaced.

To this old fart, it all seems very normal. Many Microsoft instant millionaires did the same thing in Microsoft’s heyday, and so did Cisco engineers. However, for what it’s worth, Fortune professes to be worried. “Google has to prove that its quirks – its odd hiring practices (e.g., asking 45-year-olds their GPAs), refusal to play the guidance game with Wall Street, the free food, etc. – will stand the test of time. It has to show that its success is because of its Googleyness (more Googlespeak), not despite it. Even its friends harbor doubts. ‘I’m not convinced they’re in the ranks of GE or P&G or even Microsoft, for that matter,’ says Peter Chernin, president of News Corp., whose MySpace unit is a key Google partner. ‘Not yet.’ “

Even folks much younger than I can remember all the learned analysts who opined that Google was “overpriced” at $100 per share and was a great short. A recent quote had it around $582.

Still, Fortune does allow for the possibility that all is well, covering all bases: “Then there’s the possibility that Google truly is inventing an entirely new way of doing business. ‘People are labeling them as just about search,’ says Bruce Jaffe, a former M&A executive at Microsoft who came to admire Google the hard way- by competing against it. “‘but I’m not sure that’s accurate. They’ve introduced a new model for software. Think of it this way. If they are a household brand on products like Google Maps and Gmail, that may be more than just search.’ In other words, getting customers to use Google all the time would make it ubiquitous on the web, as Windows is on PCs. ‘It may be that they’re in a whole other world from everyone else,’ says Jaffe. ‘They could be such pioneers that no one will know for years.’ “

Something for everyone in this article.