Holy Moly, Googlers Really Are Taking Over Every Major Technology Company
Snapchat poached Instagram's head of advertising, Emily White, to be COO.
Prior to working at Instagram, White was a Googler, which prompted another former Googler, Hunter Walk to tweet the following:
Xoogler is a nickname for former Googlers. That list is pretty amazing, when you get right down to it.
And, because Twitter only allows so many characters, and Walk was probably doing it off the top of his head, he missed a few others: The CFO of Uber and CEO of Pinterest came up in response to his tweet.
We're not sure there's another tech company in the world with the same sort of high-level dispersion of its former employees.
There are three notable companies missing from this list: Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. Otherwise, pretty much every big tech company has a former Google in its highest ranks.
Here's the run down of the people mentioned by Walk:
- Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. At Google, she was VP of global sales and operations.
- Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter. Came to Google when it bought his company Feedburner.
- Bob Lee, CTO of Square (which is what we think Walk meant). At Google he was a software engineer.
- Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram. He was at Google for two years working at various groups.
- Emily White COO of Snapchat. At Google, she was director of emerging business.
- Jon Steinberg, COO of BuzzFeed. At Google, he worked on the Local Markets team.
- Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo. Was an early, long-time Googler who did a lot of stuff.
- Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL. Was head of sales at Google.
- Ben Silbermann, CEO of Pinterest. Worked in sales at Google.
- Brent Callinicos, CFO of Uber. He was VP, Treasurer & Chief Accountant at Google.
There's a lot more, but this is an impressive list on its own!