Investor panic pressured Google toward profit despite its search dominance

Evidence

Many Google investors began to express doubts about the company’s prospects, and some threatened to withdraw support. Pressure for profit mounted sharply, despite the fact that Google Search was widely considered the best of all the search engines, traffic to its website was surging, and a thousand résumés flooded the firm’s Mountain View office each day. Page and Brin were seen to be moving too slowly, and their top venture capitalists, John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz from Sequoia, were frustrated. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 225

Categorization

• XREF: The VC-pressure dynamic echoes the way organizational survival pressures shaped institutional forms described in earlier chapters. — connects to: Fear of financial obscurity drove Google founders to abandon founding principles — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 264; Investor pressure forced Google and Facebook to intensify advertising against their original ideals. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1086

Broader Connections

• Fear of financial obscurity drove Google founders to abandon founding principles #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 264
• Investor pressure forced Google and Facebook to intensify advertising against their original ideals. #exemplifies (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1086