By Celena Peng '16D
uring an interview with the Financial Times last Friday, Google CEO Larry Page answered the concern of how to manage Google’s huge expansion without being complex and impossible to run the company. His answer is to be like Warren Buffett, the famed investor who has turned Berkshire Hathaway from a textile-manufacturing firm to one of the world’s largest and most profitable conglomerates with business interests in insurance, railroads, retail, jewelry, bricks, ice cream and underwear. Buffett’s investing strategy is to find strong companies with capable leaders, acquire them and then let those executives run their businesses mostly undisturbed. He allocates capital from the holding company to those businesses after periodic updates from the executives, typically once a year.Larry Page is now following the same way as Buffett manages the firm. Some of the company’s newest investments can exemplify Page’s reorganization movement. Tony Fadell, a former Apple design executive, oversees the connected home business Nest, which was acquired in 2013 for $3.2 Billion, the second largest acquisition made by Google. Arthur Levinson, the former chairman and CEO of biotech startup Genentech, leads the health startup Calico, an R&D biotech company aiming to increase people’s longevity. Craig Barratt, ex-CEO of Wi-Fi chipmaker Atheros Communication, heads the Access and Energy business, a new division in renewable energy and networking infrastructure. Larry Page trusts those senior people enough to let them run the most operations and make decisions.As Google continues to expand in the past years, such structure enables the company to make faster and better decisions. In the past, all areas and developed new products have to be reported directly to the CEO Larry Page. After the reorganization, just as Page mentioned, the changes would “free me up a bit so I can focus on the bigger picture.”In addition, Larry Page is also taking similar approaches in investing new areas and companies, by providing “long-term, patient capital” to the new units. He even follows Buffett’s investing habits of making financial predictions. He predicts that the economy is expecting deflation, or big price declines since nowadays technology makes production more efficiently.Will Larry Page become the real Warren Buffett of Tech? It would require Page to take some extra steps to become him. One concern is that the life cycle of technology industry is different from those of businesses areas Buffett has invested in. Technology companies tend to experience bigger up-and-downs than companies in other industries; as the Tech Bubble comes, every company is making profits, but after the boom, those profitable businesses might become nothing. Therefore, in order for Larry Page to become Warren Buffett, one challenge is to identify tech businesses that are truly worth investing in.Sourceshttp://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/31/will-google-become-the-berkshire-hathaway-of-tech/http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/27/in-new-structure-google-ceo-page-aims-for-faster-better-decisions/http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303595404579318952802236612http://www.androidauthority.com/craig-barratts-access-energy-group-gains-prominence-google-396662/Photohttp://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-FI163_google_G_20141031155809.jpg
