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What Happens When Winners Like Google Hit the Skids

Posted Mar 10, 2008 12:50pm EDT by Henry Blodget in Investing, Internet
Related: goog

As CEO of DoubleClick, Kevin Ryan helped grow the company from a small private business with a handful of employees to a global behemoth with more than 1,000. Then trouble hit.

After seeing nothing but good times for its first five years, DoubleClick plunged into the horrific 2000-2003 Internet downturn. Over the space of two years, it had to radically cut costs, watch most of its clients go out of business, and fire half its employees.

Now another former stock-market darling, Google, appears to be headed into its own "rough patch." Kevin talks about the challenge of managing a company through this period -- including the gut-wrenching experience of going from being admired as a great leader and CEO to being excoriated as the jerk who fired hundreds of loyal, hard-working colleagues.

Kevin thinks Google will have to fire some people over the next year -- a first for a company whose cozy, opulent Googleplex work environment has always seemed just short of paradise. Kevin thinks Google is a great company and will power through the downturn. But in the meantime, he thinks, Eric, Larry, Sergey, et. al., will take some major lumps.

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