The news that Google Sites chief Joe Kraus has moved to Google Venture, Google’s venture capital arm, is part of a larger strategy that has more to do with human resources than capital investments.
Like many rivals in IT, Google (GOOG) doesn’t have any place for many of its top executives to go; no one is going to supplant Larry Ellison at Oracle (ORCL) or Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com (CRM), to name a couple. But Oracle and Salesforce.com do have a way to deal with high-powered and creative executives without losing them to rival outfits: they provide capital for start-ups. Benioff got more than Ellison’s blessing to start Salesforce, and Benioff has himself invested in start-ups by his own executives, like Tien Tzuo, who started cloud billing vendor Zuora last year.
To read more, please see Google Drains Brains To Google Ventures on my Technology Insights blog at BNET.
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