Google Faces Decline Of Entrepreneurial Energy
The Financial Times reports, “A handful of high-profile departures does not mean Google is facing a brain drain. But the company is starting to suffer something that could have an equally significant impact: a drain of some of the entrepreneurial energy that drove its early growth and on which its unique culture depends heavily.” While Google “continues to suck in some of the best talent around,” and former Googlers “pay tribute to the intellectually stimulating culture, good pay levels and extravagant benefits,” for some early hires Google “has lost two vital ingredients: the anything-goes approach of a start-up environment and the chance to strike it rich. The question now is how heavily its culture has been built on these factors.” The Times notes, “This points to an underlying tension in Silicon Valley: between the start-up drive that has built successive generations of technology companies, and the more stable, long-term engineering-led cultures that companies such as Intel and HP have been able to instill.”
The fading of its start-up culture also poses difficult questions about Google’s ability to attract and retain the right sort 
of talent. One senior Google executive says that even as the company loses some of its early leaders who have a greater tolerance of working in high-risk companies, it is succeeding in drawing in a different type of executive: someone who values stability more.
This points to an underlying tension in Silicon Valley: between the start-up drive that has built successive generations of technology companies, and the more stable, long-term engineering-led cultures that companies such as Intel and HP have been able to instill.
One Silicon Valley headhunter, who also thinks that Google is no longer a magnet for all the region’s best talent, questions whether the company could retain its creativity as it makes this shift - though, as this person adds, Apple at least has proved that it is possible for a mature tech company to remain highly creative.
That does not account for Google’s particular culture, though. This relies on a form of barely controlled chaos in which workers are encouraged to come up with their own ideas for future products in what the company calls their “20 per cent time” - a system that is the complete opposite of the one that Steve Jobs has built.
“Apple is completely top-down, Google is bottom-up,” says Mr Sacca. As SiliconValley’s entrepreneurial talent starts to look elsewhere for the next main chance, that could threaten the engine on which Google has relied to drive the next phase of its growth.
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