Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

The news today that venture capital firm Benchmark Capital has snagged two early Google employees (behind Google’s popular Maps product) is not surprising; there’s a fair number of Googlers who have done extremely well due to Google’s rapid climb to the top of the technology food chain. I’m surprised, however, that there hasn’t been more attention given to the many people who joined Google (before Google’s April 2004 IPO, I might add) from its acquisition of Santa Monica’s Applied Semantics back in 2003. Applied Semantics is the technology which drives Google AdSense (originally Applied Semantics AdSense), a huge part of the Google advertising machine. Given an April 2003 close of that acquisition, there are a number of employees either at or near the end of their “golden handcuffs”, and probably ready to move back into a startup. (either that, or to buy a plane/yacht/island/country and retire…)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 9:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.