Larry Page and Sergey Brin leave Google

By the time Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially left Google, they had been absent for a long time. Neither had been to a company all-hands in months, and they had been largely out of the loop since Google restructured into Alphabet in 2015. The non-Google Alphabet projects had largely flamed out, and the meaningful business decisions were already left to Sundar Pichai. In some ways, it felt like the departure was an official recognition of something that had been true for years.

There was a time when the departure of the founders would have plunged a tech company into self-doubt, but at Google, the move was met with something closer to relief. The two men were closely tied to Andy Rubin’s sexual harassment payoff, which spurred the largest employee walkout in industry history, and they had left Pichai with a maddening set of problems. There was internal strife over government contracts, the daily battle of moderating the world’s biggest video platform, and a simmering feud with the Republican Party and Donald Trump. Pichai would need lots of help and luck getting through it, and Page and Brin would only be a distraction. It was time to get serious.

It was an anticlimactic note for the end of the decade but an important lesson. Google has grown up, like the rest of the industry, and it needs a wise caretaker more than a boy genius. As we head into 2020, those caretakers are in short supply.

-Russell Brandom