Google Alumni Set Out in Search of the Next Big Thing

By Miguel Helft

Chris Sacca had a plum job as the Wi-Fi guru at Google. But with his stock options fully vested, he left the Internet search company this month for a new career as a venture capitalist.

Sacca, 32, joins a growing number of Google millionaires hoping to parlay their newfound wealth into even greater riches by bankrolling technology start-ups.

Three years after Google went public, a fast-growing network of company veterans is fanning out across Silicon Valley. Some are joining the venture capital firms that financed the technology boom of the 1990s. Others are raising investment funds or backing embryonic companies with their own money as so-called angel investors.

“I had one of the best jobs in the world,” said Sacca, who as head of special initiatives at Google led a number of high-profile projects, including the creation of a free Wi-Fi network in Mountain View, California, the company’s hometown. “But there is a world of opportunity.”

So after four years at Google, he struck out on his own to raise a venture fund. Like many Silicon Valley hands, Sacca enjoys working at small companies. And Google, which has more than 16,000 employees, is hardly the start-up it once was.

In their new careers, Google alumni like Sacca are increasingly turning to former colleagues for money and ideas. They help each other line up investors, identify entrepreneurs and hire talented engineers and managers.

Some Google veterans hope to turn their loose affiliation into the next powerful network in Silicon Valley, where webs of money and connections have helped build many companies.

“We are planning to bring all the ex-Googlers who are starting companies and investing in companies together to tighten up the network,” said Aydin Senkut, a former sales manager who joined Google in 1999, when it had 62 employees. Senkut left in 2005 to become a full-time angel investor.

It often pays to stick together in Silicon Valley. PayPal, the online payment system, spawned a bunch of serial entrepreneurs who went on to found and finance some of the hottest Web 2.0 companies, among them YouTube, LinkedIn and Slide.

Many PayPal alums invest in one another’s companies. One co- founder, Peter Thiel, who runs a $3 billion hedge fund and venture firm in San Francisco, is the godfather of what people jokingly call the PayPal Mafia.

There are no guarantees, of course, that Google’s growing crop of alumni-investors will succeed, either individually or as a group.

“The challenge for the Google guys is to demonstrate what value they can bring, beyond making introductions to someone at Google,” said Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship. Kedrosky said those at the center of the PayPal Mafia were founders and early employees who learned a great deal by building their start-up into an online payments powerhouse.

EBay eventually bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. “They had experience at iterating strategy and making payroll,” he said of the PayPal gang.

But Silicon Valley has plenty of believers in the investing skills of at least some ex-Googlers.

“Google arguably is at the center of the online advertising ecosystem,” said Roger Lee, a general partner at Battery Ventures, a prominent venture capital firm. Lee recently recruited Satya Patel, who spent four years as a Google advertising executive.

“If you understand how Google works and how associated business models work, it gives you a great lens to understand other advertising companies,” Lee said.

So far, Google veterans have not invested that much in companies led by other ex-Googlers. But as they seek expertise, advice and early access to start-ups, they are increasingly turning to their former colleagues. Little by little, the group is coalescing.

Since leaving Google in 2005, Senkut, 38, may have become the most active angel investor of the bunch, putting $25,000 to $100,000 each in about 35 companies. So far, only two of those were started by ex-Googlers.

But Senkut has invested alongside other former Google employees, including Paul Buchheit, 31, who built the first versions of Gmail, and Georges Harik, 36, who ran many of Google’s new businesses when the company began expanding beyond Internet search.

The three invested in Meraki Networks, which helps extend the reach of wireless Internet access technologies. The firm was started by a group of former Google interns.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

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