Do No Evil…At Least in Your Own Company?
In another longer section, Levy describes how Google product manager Wesley Chan, who had pushed for the company’s GrandCentral acquisition and was leading development on Google Voice, concocted and executed a plan to block Google from buying Skype, which it was seriously considering. (The timing and order of these events isn’t made explicit, which is a recurring issue through the book, but I’m a niggler for those details.) Chan apparently bragged directly to Levy about his machinations: With [Salar Kamangar and Sergey Brin] on board, Chan devised a plan to kill the Skype purchase. As he later described it, his scheme involved “laying grenades” at the executive meeting where the purchase was up for approval. Chan tricked the business development executive who was pushing the acquisition into thinking that he was in favor of the deal: he had even prepared a PowerPoint presentation with all the reasons Google should buy Skype. Chan says that halfway through the presentation, though, the trap sprang. Brin suddenly began asking questions that the deck didn’t address. “Who’s going to run this?” he demanded. “Not me,” said Kamangar. Craig Walker said he had two kids in school and wasn’t about to make regular runs to Eastern Europe. “What are the regulatory risks?” A lawyer said it might take months to get approval. Finally, Brin looked at Chan and asked why Google would want to take the risk to begin with. Chan dropped his defense entirely and began explaining why Google had no need for Skype. “At that point,” recalls Chan, “Sergey gets up and says, ‘This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen.’ And Eric [Schmidt] gets up and walks out of the room. The deal’s off.”
