The Ex-Googler news just keeps coming, and news.com has post about the magic of 3 Googlers getting together to start a company.
So it seems only fitting that ex-Googlers--of which there are many these days--are setting a new trend when it comes to starting their own companies. The equation? It takes at least three former Googleheads to start a start-up. It's like forming a triangle of Google juju.
The latest upstart to be formed in this mold is Mechanical Zoo, a social search application company started by Nathan Stoll, former product manager of Google News. Stoll is joined by Max Ventilla, a former Google business development executive, and Fritz Schneider, who worked on application security at the search company for more than five years. Like many other fresh companies from Google exes, Mechanical Zoo is still in stealth mode, but it plans to launch a beta product next month.
It takes a cue from Cuill, a stealth start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif. Cuill was founded by Anna Patterson and Russell Power, former technical leads of Google's large index search engine, TeraGoogle. Its Google threesome is completed by Louis Monier, who technically is better known for being the founding CTO of one of the Web's first search engines, AltaVista. Monier was a high-profile hire at Google, but he worked there only briefly on search design.
And closes with
Triangulating a new service that Google hasn't thought of yet, or simply hasn't devoted the resources to yet, seems to be another common theme of many of these start-ups. "It's stupid to try to outdo Google. I can do more good outside Google than inside by doing something complementary," said Max Ventilla, CEO of Mechanical Zoo.
Which got me thinking, maybe the real area Google needs to keep their data center secrets from are the start-ups from ex-Googlers. One of the biggest help to ex-Googlers would be a data center infrastructure that looks just like the one they left. Most developers have no idea what the infrastructure looks like, but they do know how they want it to work. So, there is a demand for Google type of environments. This is a Amazon's AWS. And Wired writes.
Just across Highway 101 from the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, a banner fluttering from a nondescript building heralds yet another high tech dream: Ooyala. Inside, a dozen software engineers wearing headphones pore over screenloads of code while grazing on M&Ms and organic treats served in plastic tubs. The three founders, all Google emigres, are chasing a suitably big idea — interactive "hypervideo" with seamlessly embedded links. What they're not doing is blowing capital on shiny hardware. They built their television killer using little more than the desktops in front of them, plus major slices of computing power courtesy of Mr. Bezos. "You can't execute fast when you're running to the data center every night to fix machines," says Ooyala engineering chief Sean Knapp. "Infrastructure is the big guys' most powerful asset. This levels the field."
Or at least if they are going to subscribe to a cloud service, they'll use google's service.
