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Kevin Rose is an internet entrepreneur. He has built a number of consumer products, including Digg in 2004. Previously he was a venture capitalist with Google Ventures, but now he’s doing that with True Ventures. He also hosts a podcast.
This past weekend he posted the following photo to his Instagram:
Here’s the story.
After begging his mom to take him to the printers, he got this business card made when he was 13 years old. Foliage Software wasn’t a real company, of course. But it had business cards and he was not only a Programmer and the Owner, but a Senior Programmer and the Owner.
I laughed as soon as I saw this post because it is exactly the sort of thing that the 13 year old version of me would have done and probably did. (The combination of upper and lower case letters on the card also helped with the humor.) I’m sure if I dug around my mother’s house I would find a trail of my failed business schemes and project ideas.
But that’s entirely the point he is trying to make. Try. Fail. Learn. Refine. All of these actions will increase your odds of success at the next go around. Nobody will remember the failures anyways.
Seth Godin perhaps said it best with: “The tiny cost of failure is dwarfed by the huge cost of not trying.”
On Monday, Google broke the internet when it announced that it was reorganizing itself into a holding company structure called Alphabet.
That means that Google, Inc. will now become a subsidiary, along with many other companies, of Alphabet Inc. and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares in Alphabet.
This is huge, but also something that was likely inevitable given the passions of the founders. Apparently Larry Page has been thinking about this move for years.
As it stands pre-Alphabet, Google (with its main internet products) is basically a cash cow funding all of Google’s other experiments. But this muddied the waters and made it difficult for investors to clearly see how much the main internet products were making and how much the founders were spending on self-driving cars, delivery drones (Project Wing), and other new ideas.
Now everything will be separate.
But what’s really exciting about the reorganization is that it sets the stage for Alphabet/Google – which is arguably already one of the most important companies in the world – to become even more impactful in a wide variety of industries and disciplines, some/many not traditionally associated with tech. Each wholly owned subsidiary will have their own CEO and the founders rightly believe, I think, that this overall structure will afford them more “management scale.”
Within Google will remain search, advertising, maps, YouTube, and the Android mobile operating system. But already Alphabet is the parent company of the following other businesses:
Calico, an anti-aging life extension company
Sidewalk, a smart cities company whose mission is to improve life in cities
Nest, an “internet of things” company that makes connected devices for your home
Fiber, a company that offers super fast internet
Google Ventures (venture capital) & Google Capital (private equity)
Google X, which is the lab developing self-driving cars and delivery drones (Project Wing)
If you can’t tell, I’m bullish on all of this. The approach really resonates with me and I can’t wait to see what Alphabet becomes. If you’d like to read the full and official blog post announcement, click here.
Cheers to trying new things and making big bets.
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