Of course founders from companies like YouTube, Invite Media, and Admeld have left after being acquired. Google managed to hire both Evan Williams and Biz Stone through acquisitions, but both ended up leaving the company and founding Twitter together. And in the midst of this success, there have certainly been some glaring failures. Dodgeball, the predecessor to Foursquare, was acquired by Google in 2005, but founders Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert ended up leaving by 2007, upset over a lack of resources and integration they needed to grow their product.

"The reason it was a missed opportunity was because they ended up in the wrong place at the company," says Brian McClendon. "They didn’t end up here, near the Geo team, they were in New York. They were very small and didn’t get the support they needed. Working across the country is a hard problem. In general we do a better job than any company with communicating across geographies, but it’s still tough, so we missed that opportunity."

It was a costly mistake that has Google still playing catch-up in the local space with the recent acquisitions of old media companies Zagat and Frommers. In the meantime, Foursquare has poached a number of employees from Google.

Google also seemed to be falling behind in the booming social networking space. Products like Wave and Buzz were roundly mocked by the press and failed to catch on with users. "The mission of this company, from the beginning, was to organize all the world’s information," says Brian McClendon. "Well the problem with that is you can rationalize a connection to pretty much every industry."

When founder Larry Page took over in April of 2011, it was clear he agreed. One of his first moves as the new CEO was to re-organize Google so that it was tightly focused around product divisions. Instead of functional divides like Finance, Legal, Marketing, and Infrastructure, Page created seven new structures: Mobile, Social, Chrome, YouTube, Ads, Search, and GeoCommerce.

"I think Google went wider than it perhaps should have and spread itself too thin," says McClendon. "So Larry’s strategy of ‘more wood behind fewer arrows’ has tightened the focus and simplified the product space."

As he refocused Google, Page made aggressive cuts, shutting down newly acquired social projects like Aardvark and Slide. It seemed as if Google was becoming a less accommodating place, unwilling to give the same kind of free reign to incoming entrepreneurs that it once had. "The search company no longer dabbles in exotic ideas," wrote Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. "Now it’s all business."