Former Google employees say that the company’s founders are concerned about the prevention and extermination of evil.
At the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit, attendees learned that having their genome mapped will set them back US$300,000 and that Google Inc.’s founders really stress over the prevention and extermination of evil.
During a panel of former Google employees, they confirmed to moderator and conference chair John Battelle that, yes, Larry Page and Sergey Brin do factor heavily into business and technology decisions whether they will have evil consequences.
WeatherBill CEO David Friedberg belonged to Google’s Corporate Development team and, when negotiating acquisitions, it wasn’t unheard of for either Page or Brin to ask hard questions about the deals if they sensed that the members of companies’ management teams had an evil streak, he said.
Meanwhile, entrepreneur Bret Taylor, who developed products at Google for four years, said Page and Brin were excellent at steering product teams to think big while reminding them always keep in mind the question of evil.
Earlier in the day, genetics maverick J. Craig Venter informed attendees that mapping a person’s genome these days costs about $300,000, but that, as happened with calculators, the price will tumble over time. For instance, if you can wait a couple of years, the cost will probably be closer to $100,000. That’s a bargain compared with the about $70 million that it cost to map Venter’s genome.
