Why aren’t there more Googles?

A brilliant look at why there aren’t more Googles.

Why aren’t there more Googles? The answer’s very simple. Because every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out long before it ever had the chance to revolutionize anything economically. Think about that for a second. Every single one: Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media, the works. All sold out to behemoths who are destroying, with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation within them.

This is a call to arms for innovative entrepreneurs.

Let’s replay the Google story. Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo - what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time - didn’t sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo’s or MSN’s search box.

Why isn’t it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better. Because it did, it held on and revolutionized the advertising value chain – and, in turn, capital markets gave Google an exuberant welcome.

See the point? If all Larry, Sergey, and Google’s investors had wanted to do was to sell out fast to the highest bidder, they could have done so at any time. But they didn’t: they chose to revolutionize something that sucked - and so a tsunami of new value was unlocked. That’s how Google was made.