That was an absolutely spot-on description of what it was like when I joined in 2007 or 2008

Jesus. Tell me more. You didn’t happen to be involved in deepmind are you? I kind of _loathe_ google these days but find it absolutely mind blowing that there was a time when they were just casually unblocking the scientific community for funsies…to the point where parents could just leverage google’s freebies to maybe shed some light on their kids’ rare disease. It pains me to think this won’t be happening anymore because really, you can’t sic your brightness engineers on detecting ad blockers _and_ casually make scientific breakthroughs. Something happened to google and the we’ll be writing about for decades to come but if there’s one thing I’m certain it’s that they are done trying to make the world a better place.

One of the things that makes me sad about this is that Sergei and Larry seem so checked out. They were mostly gone when I was there, but I've always gotten the feeling that Google was like grad school because Larry and Sergei wanted it that way. I get that they've made a ton of money, but it also seems like they really wanted to spend their lives making awesome stuff and doing things like scanning books and making them free. And it feels a bit like the market forces took Google away from them. They put Sundar and a bunch of other McKinsey alums in charge. And McKinsey is, from what I can tell, basically the opposite of grad school. Whenever I did see Larry or Sergei make an appearance they always looked a little dead inside and like they were just going through the motions. And from what I can tell, the original sin was taking VC funding. Once they took VC funding, they had limited actua…

> he lost their trust What does this mean? Yes, I understand the English, but I mean deeper: What are you trying to say? And, why does it matter? Who cares about "losing the trust of the users". What matters is that 99% of "professional workers" don't have a choice what mail/chat/calendar/word processor they use. Their IT department decided for them. And, if they do have a choice, what do they use instead? > Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things. Most of Google is now mature products. Run it like a business -- maximize profits. It seems logical to me.

How was Sundar at the time you joined? According to Wikipedia he spearheaded the development of Chrome, GDrive, GMaps, GMail and the VP8 format which are all monumental products so he sounds like he was quite like every other talented hacker that thrived in early Google culture. Is that not the case? What made him turn to the dark side so abruptly?

I think it was Jamie Zawinski who said the reason he left Netscape was that it went from being full of people that wanted to build a great company to being full of people who wanted to work at a great company. The later culture won.