Back in 2000, when Google was just getting started, its venture capital backers insisted the fledling company find an experieced CEO to provide ‘adult supervision.’
Venture capitalist John Doerr arranged for Google’s young co-founders to meet with half-a-dozen Silicon Valley CEOs in an attempt to get the process started. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met with Intel’s Andy Grove, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and several others.
At the end of the tour, they were ready to hire a CEO but there was a problem, according to Wired senior writer Steven Levy:
… they would only consider one person: Steve Jobs.
Jobs was busy running Apple, of course, which was just about to introduce the first iPod, the product that would transform the company. Doerr persuaded them to widen their net and introduced them to Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Novell. Schmidt became Google’s CEO in 2001.
The nugget about Steve Jobs is from the latest Wired magazine, in a story about Larry Page retaking the reins as Google’s CEO. It is not yet online. The story is an excerpt from Levy’s upcoming book, “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives,” which is available for pre-order on Amazon.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
20 responses to “Steve Jobs Was First Choice For Google’s CEO”
Another example, if true, of a company succeeding by getting what they needed, not what they wanted. In other words, they did it in spite of themselves.
Which issue is this? I don’t remember this article in Wired 19.03, with the Foxxconn story.
Too bad for Google… they could have been so much more if they had scored SJ.
Fandroids everywhere would be singing his praises and would not be blind to words that mean nothing in the current Google vocabulary.. like “open”.
Hey, maybe Android would have been what it was meant to be as well – something free of carrier rule. Fragmentation wouldn’t exist, and the devices might actually be of some quality.
Crazy.
Remember reading that on Phandroid.com that they interviewed him, but don’t rember part that he was the first choice, Eric Schmidt was in fact forst choice.
Bummer for Google. Schmidt marked a major turning point for Google– downward. Their adventure into smartphones, lead by Schmidt, will eventually be the undoing of the company.
Long AAPL, and (regrettably) Google. They should have stuck with search!
When was that picture taken? He looks a lot younger and healthier than he does know.
Not to be terribly blunt, but Google has been quite a success despite not getting Steve Jobs. On the other hand, Apple wouldn’t be able to claim half the success without Jobs. Because of that, we now have two massively successful companies, instead of just one, and now they’re competing with each other in the mobile device market, to the benefit of consumers like us.
my god. This is a very old story. Like last year.
It’s the April edition — the one with the controversial cover of Limor Fried: http://www.businessinsider.com…
One thing to think about is whether Larry and Sergey really would have hired Steve Jobs. After all, he doesn’t have a PhD.
Google was famous for hiring PhDs for its technical jobs. Larry and Sergey were PhD students at Stanford when they founded Google, but they dropped out. In the early days they focused on hiring PhDs. Some say that’s why they hired Dr. Eric Schmidt — he has a PhD in computer engineering.
Of course, Steve Jobs dropped out of college. I’ll bet that Larry and Sergey are intellectually insecure and would ultimately have passed on Jobs.