Personal Bytes

Today we had a very interesting pitch at FEUP by Google’s Vertical Head Portugal (what a title…), Dr. Paulo Barreto. Barreto has a degree in management and an MBA from MIT.

Most of the presentation was headed towards presenting Google as if we didn’t know it. Despite being repetitive (who doesn’t know Google by now?) there were some very interesting details like the fact that until very recently Larry Page has reviewed all the applicants at their last interview, from the secretaries in Berlin to the engineers in Mountain View (especially the secretaries from Berlin :-).

At the end I took the chance to ask some questions. I like to squeeze them out :-)

I started by stating that Google had been partly growing by acquisition which looks quite well on the financial report if we disregard the notion extraordinary results and goodwill. I also said that Google’s current market value is way above what’s worth in reality considering its equity, assets, cash flow, etc. Regarding the aforementioned statements I asked until when could Google keep up with this?

Dr. Barreto responded that Google still has a lot to grow. He referred that India, a market with more than 1 billion people only has 1% of its population accessing the internet. He’s also confident on the expansion of the mobile market and also TV on the internet. He also noted that YouTube’s acquisition was on behalf of believing that it will be the television of the future (this reminds me of Apple and January 9th when Steve Jobs will be giving a keynote at WWDC. Could their new products have anything related with this?).

In my humble opinion what’s said is true. Nevertheless, I don’t believe it’s enough to keep up with the enormous expectation around GOOG’s stock symbol. Moreover, depending almost entirely on Google AdSense revenues is very risky.

On my second question I reminded him of a recent rumour about the possibility of Portugal being a test site for Google’s upcoming projects. This information was immediately discarded by Dr. Barreto and labeled as false (not even inaccurate!).

Another discussion arose by two fellows of mine. One was concerned about people’s privacy since Google keeps personal information and the other called the question about entering on the China market and what it meant. It’s a really tough question since it’s not only censuring but rather providing misleading information. You can check this out by searching for Tienamen in google.cn where you’ll find a quite different story from what really happened during the revolution of the students that took place in 1989.

He wasn’t able to provide with a convincing answer other than he didn’t believe Google would betray its users concerning privacy (I also don’t believe that but I’d like to be given something more than anedoctal evidence).

Overall, it was a nice seminar. The guy was nice and dignifies Google’s culture. I hope Google decides to open some jobs in Portugal. We definitely have very capable people in the wild.