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deepdarkforestlast Thursday at 6:23 PM8 repliesview on HN

> Sundar is a really uninspiring leader

I understand, but he made google a cash machine. Last quarter BEFORE he was CEO in 2015, google made a quarterly profit of around 3B. Q1 2025 was 35B. a 10x profit growth at this scale well, its unprecedented, the numbers are inspiring themselves, that's his job. He made mistakes sure, but he stuck to google's big gun, ads, and it paid off. The transition to AI started late but gemini is super competitive overall. Deepmind has been doing great as well.

Sundar is not a hypeman like Sam or Cook, but he delivers. He is very underrated imo.


Replies

modelesslast Thursday at 6:35 PM

Like Ballmer, he was set up for success by his predecessor(s), and didn't derail strong growth in existing businesses but made huge fumbles elsewhere. The question is, who is Google's Satya Nadella? Demis?

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deodorellast Thursday at 8:58 PM

He might have delivered a lot of revenue growth yea, but Google culture is basically gone. Internally we're not very far from Amazon style "performance management"

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CuriouslyClast Thursday at 6:36 PM

He delivered revenue growth by enshittifying Goog's products. Gemini is catching up because Demis is a boss and TPUs are a real competitive advantage.

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cyberaxlast Thursday at 10:30 PM

> Last quarter BEFORE he was CEO in 2015, google made a quarterly profit of around 3B. Q1 2025 was 35B.

Google's revenue in 2014 was $75B and in 2024 it was $348B, that's 4.64 times growth in 10 years or 3.1 times if corrected for the inflation.

And during this time, Google failed to launch any significant new revenue source.

gjvclast Thursday at 9:47 PM

Tim Cook is the opposite of a hypeman.

SV_BubbleTimelast Thursday at 6:57 PM

I like that you are writing as a defense of Google and Sundar.

agumonkeylast Thursday at 6:42 PM

Their brand is almost cooked though. At least the legacy search part. Maybe they'll morph into AI center of the future, but "Google" has been washed away.

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oceanplexianlast Thursday at 7:02 PM

> The transition to AI started late but gemini is super competitive overall.

If by competitive you mean "We spent $75 Billion dollars and now have a middle of the pack model somewhere between Anthropic and Chinese startup", that's a generous way to put it.

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