Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

I was amused to see this post on Valleywag about Google’s Susan Wojcicki improperly taking credit for AdSense, and the fact that AdSense came from Santa Monica-based Applied Semantics.

I’m very surprised by the number of people I run into who don’t even realize that Applied Semantics (which was purchased by Google a year before its IPO) was the “brains” behind Google AdSense. In fact, Google AdSense was at one time Applied Semantics AdSense, and the reason why Google opened a Southern California office in the first place. I’ve run into quite a few venture capitalists (who absolutely love backing employees from companies that have been successful in the past) who weren’t even aware of Applied Semantics and its success — probably because the employees have hung on at Google for a long time given the huge upside they saw on their options. Even if they’re out there, they probably wouldn’t need a venture capitalist to fund their own company…

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 7:13 am and is filed under Google. 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.