BW Online | May 17, 2004 | Just How Different Is Google?

BW Online | May 17, 2004 | Just How Different Is Google?: "if you look closely at the areas that matter in any company's operations and personality -- the dissemination of power and money -- you discover that Google isn't really different from many other tightly-run and successful emerging businesses. It is at once highly controlling and focused.

THE BOTTOM LINE. How do they run the company? The simple answer is that they seem to run a tight ship. Larry and Sergey each made a base salary last year of $150,000, with $206,000 in bonuses. And they were smart enough to pay Eric Schmidt, the CEO, more than themselves -- $250,000 of base salary, plus a $301,000 bonus. For a company with nearly $1 billion of revenue last year, the executive compensation is quite modest. Equally impressive is that directors haven't been receiving cash compensation. Yes, the stock they received in the past is now quite valuable, but it wasn't always that way.

Perhaps most impressive is one statistic that hasn't received a great deal of attention: last year's $961.9 million of revenue, when apportioned among Google's 1,907 employees, translates into more than $500,000 revenue per employee. That is a hefty number for a young fast-growing company -- a number likely to grow substantially as the company cashes in further on its dominance of online information retrieval. "