Tech visionary Susan Wojcicki died of lung cancer on August 9th. It’s always sad anytime someone dies too early, but it’s especially sad that Wojcicki won’t get to see more of the future she helped create.
Wojcicki’s enormous net worth at the time of her death signals how outside the norm her view of the commercial future was. We know this to be true simply because we know that $20 left on the ground won’t go long without a taker.
By extension, good and great ideas worth hundreds of millions and billions similarly don’t lack for takers from the existing business elite. That Wojcicki died nearly a billionaire tells us that she saw a future that the elite mostly did not.
More evidence supporting this claim can be found in obituaries that report it was Wojcicki who rented garage space to Sergey Brin and Larry Page long ago. Working at Intel at the time, Wojcicki handed over her garage to Brin and Page for $1,700/month. What became Google emerged from these most inauspicious of beginnings.
Google’s early days in a garage in Menlo Park signal many things. Most notably they signal the absurdity of U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta’s claim that Google is a seemingly impregnable “monopoly.” In commerce, there’s no such thing. That is so because in commerce there’s no such thing as a frontier. There’s always some extraordinary, Dostoevsky-an thinker or thinkers aggressively working to replace the present with something much, much better.
What’s remarkable about Wojicki is that she clearly saw what so many didn’t, that AOL and Yahoo (the giants of the Internet as the 20th century was coming to a close) wouldn’t be AOL and Yahoo forever. Eventually, but also quickly, people with a clearer picture of what’s ahead would replace them.
Wojcicki’s renting of garage space to Brin and Page was an implied comment that AOL’s “everywhere” qualities were much more than ephemeral. About such a comment, let’s not forget how outside the norm it was. Twenty-five year ago AOL’s power was such that its combination with Time Warner was held up for a year, yet Wojcicki was renting space to two unknowns eager to somehow unseat an internet behemoth?
Rooted yet again in Wojicki’s willingness was the rare but essential view that what has forever qualities in business most certainly does not. It speaks not just to the simplistic nature of Judge Mehta’s claim, but also the danger of it. It’s best to focus on the danger first.
As with all alleged monopolies, it seems only they know they’re not monopolies. Google is no different in this sense. At present, and as tens of billions worth of investment by Google on an annual basis remind us, its executives recognize that absent its ability to sleuth a future that is most certainly opaque, Google itself will soon enough be, like AOL, a technology giant that was. That is so because in business, the present is always and everywhere the past. The danger in Mehta’s simplistic view of commerce is that he can’t see how tenuous Google’s prominence is.
Of course, his inability to see what he can’t see speaks to the simplicity of his empty case against Google. Which is why it’s too bad Wojcicki won’t be around to explain to the Judge that Google’s replacement is almost certainly as unknown as Google once was.
The Judge in Mehta lacked the vision to see Google before it was Google, and by extension he hasn’t a faint clue about what will inevitably replace Google if it fails to find the future. It’s a reminder that simplistic as Mehta’s case against Google is, the answer to the case’s simplicity is even more basic: it can be found in a garage in Menlo Park.