John - when you started in May of 1999 how was adwords?
Omid - It was non existant.
John - So what did you do?
Omid - I was first guy with a suit. Culture of hiring great people. How do we get the first folks in the door.
John - did you have a sense of what that was going to be?
Omid - I could tell when I met the founders that they were passionate about innovating. They would make the best of anything that they tried.
John - These ideas that Google is throwing up seems to be all targetted at a foe... What's your view of the fact that you're from Netscape and got eviscerated by Microsoft.
Omid - This area is very powerful. It's going to attract a lot of competition. We obsess about our users. We want to try new ideas. We only fail if we fail our users.
John - So are you saying you're not thinking about Microsoft?
Omid - We watch them but I think we'll fail if we focus on them.
John - Wallstreet, when you first read the S1 it was unusual. Seemed like a finger to wallstreet. A year and a half later do you feel pressure to meet the quarter's nubmers?
Omid - Absolutely but we felt this all along. I remembered worrying about making the quarter with Enterprise sales and how crazy that was. Yes the pressure is there.
John - Adwords, did people use adsense as their revenue stream? 3/4 search innovators use adwords as revenue stream.
What inning are we in? What % of the adwords potential market has been played out.
Omid - Larry says he counts when a query comes back. He says that it's not as good as they can and should be. Adwords can and will be improved.
John - Google is starting be compared to Microsoft in the 90s. Startups now need to answer the question - what are you going to do when Google does this? Is there a way to understand what business you're really in? You're doing so many different things.
Omid - This is something that we talk about. We don't want to be viewed as the Gorilla in the valley. We do have that sense of responsibility.
The VCs are saying that there's a lot of innovation in the valley.
Google is an innovation company. We are trying to be nimble.
John - I rean into Eric Schmidt and I asked how are you holding together. You're hiring more than 10 people today. How do you do this without blowing up.
Omid - We are trying to make it a science. We're in a mad rush to catch up with teh phenomena. Executive team looks at every hire.
John - What's next for Media and what's Google's role?
Omid - We don't have a choice. It's all changing. Podcasting changed everything for me. Google needs to make the information available.
John - Will google play a lead role like in Everybody hates Chris? Will that replace the upfront like television.
Omid - The ad models we have today won't keep wroking. Experimentation is good. Access to content is core to the mission.
John - Media companies, magazine companies fear you. They don't know that they should trust Google.
Omid - Google doesn't sit around saying lets go crush a market. We say do what's best for the end user.
Question - As an publisher I want to get paid a percentage when a sale is closed. Is this a better way to fight click fraud?
Omid - We've made moves in that direction. If we think it's the best place to go we will move there. We are watching it now. We don't think click fraud is a big problem today. Click fraud exists but we're handling it.
Question - you've portrayed Google as a technology company. There's no sharing of information about what Google is working on. Why take that direction and when is that going to change?
Omid - The founders are academic and there is a lot of thinking about how to be a good citizen. [cop out answer but what could he say?]
Question - I have a question around the statement don't be evil. Google was saying don't sell your link status, but the people that were buying seemd like it was a double standard. Seems like a slippery slope.
Omid - When you have large networks. There is behavior that Google wouldn't stand for. We go after these things when we find them. It's not worth it to have a business that does not scale.
Question - Google Maps, license around data providers. You became an intermediary - how does it work with Navteq.
Omid - We do lots of contracts. I'm not sure about the specifics.
Question - All of a sudden we need to change the contracts because Google has become the distribution point.
Omid - Glad to talk about it offline. [Heh - tough question]
Link: http://wsfinder.typepad.com/web_service_finder/2005/10/web_20_conferen_23.html
Google `business founder' No 1
$289 MILLION, PLUS STOCK OPTION GAINS
Sometime after Google went public in August 2004, sales chief Omid Kordestani shared his thoughts on the essentials for success with a group of Silicon Valley businesswomen.
``Stay positive,'' he said. ``Smile. Move forward -- don't stay where you're at. . . . Be open to learning.''
Finally, he added, ``Measure everything.''
What was Kordestani's 2 cents worth? If it is measured by his compensation at Google last year: $289 million.
And when the 42-year-old salesman's stock option gains are measured against those of his peers, Kordestani ``probably is the world's highest-paid sales executive'' in 2005, said compensation expert Graef Crystal.
Technically, Kordestani is Google's senior vice president, global sales and business development. He's in charge of day-to-day operations of Google's sales force.
Kordestani is also known as Google's ``business founder,'' the guy who helped Sergey Brin and Larry Page figure out how to make money from their wildly popular search engine.
Google said Kordestani was not available to be interviewed.
In a statement, company spokeswoman Lynn Fox said Kordestani's compensation ``should be viewed as a reflection of his value to the company since the time he joined in 1999, and as part of the risk he assumed as one of Google's earliest employees.''
The three outside board members who make up Google's compensation committee -- venture capitalist L. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Genentech Chief Executive Arthur D. Levinson and Intel CEO Paul S. Otellini -- were either unavailable or declined to comment.
The biggest chunk of Kordestani's pay came from exercising $287,858,652 worth of stock options. He also received a bonus of $837,956, a salary of $175,000, a $2,200 contribution to his retirement plan and $588 in insurance premiums.
Kordestani's pay reflects how much his stock options were worth when he exercised them. It does not reflect the gain he received when he sold them, because that figure is not counted as compensation under accounting rules. According to SEC filings, Kordestani sold stock worth $422 million in 2005.
Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin each sold more than $1 billion worth of their stock last year, but none of it counted as compensation.
When recently asked about his sales, Brin noted that he made them on a predetermined schedule to diversify his holdings.
Brin and Page each own more than 31.5 million Google shares and control more than half of Google's voting stock. Kordestani owns 1.5 million shares.
With Google's stock trading near $375, Kordestani's stake is worth close to half a billion dollars.
Yet it was unclear when Kordestani joined Google in May 1999 that his options would be worth any money at all. ``As 1999 trickled by and we were burning cash without a clearly illuminated path to revenues, there was considerable concern,'' Michael Moritz, one of Google's early backers, told author John Battelle, who chronicled the company's founding in his book ``The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.''
Kordestani had been vice president of business development and sales at Netscape, which was sold to America Online in March 1999. A native of Iran, he had an electrical engineering degree from San Jose State University and an MBA from Stanford University.
In addition to Netscape, Kordestani had worked at the 3DO Co., Go and Hewlett-Packard. He had experienced two failed start-ups.
But Kordestani decided to take a chance on Google. He began calling former clients who had done sponsorship deals with Netscape and asking them to spend $1,000 to try Google's Adwords -- small text-based ads that ran alongside search results.
Advertisers were cynical in the wake of the dot-com crash, but the ads were surprisingly effective. They bought more ads. New companies signed up. Revenues rocketed.
Last year, Google reported $6.1 billion in sales, a 92 percent increase over the prior year. Profits jumped 268 percent to $1.5 billion. So, given Google's performance, was Kordestani's $289 million windfall excessive?It's ``impossible to say,'' Crystal said. ``You like to think people are being rewarded for their efforts as well as their accomplishments but, in many cases, you're just being rewarded just for luck.
``You just happen to be at the right place at the right time.''
Link: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/special_packages/salary_survey/14633729.htm
Flicker: Photo, Omid Kordestani
Company profile, Omid Kordestani
The People Who Shape Our World
Google: OMID KORDESTANI/Mountain View, Calif.
