From the Googleplex to the wine bar

(continued from previous page)

Credit: Google

Chris Sacca

Chris Sacca
Former Wi-Fi negotiator,
now investor
For Chris Sacca, a trained attorney from Georgetown University and an avid skier, leaving Google after nearly four years as its wireless dealmaker was a tough call, considering his run of high-profile experiences. One year he represented Silicon Valley speaking at Oxford University and the next he was battling AT&T and Verizon in a multibillion-dollar wireless spectrum auction. But once his shares vested last fall, he longed to be back at a smaller company (he started at Google in November 2003 when the company had more than 500 employees) where he could be more of a jack-of-all trades, writing business plans or helping conceive of services like Google Talk. He decided to make the leap into angel investing in December.

While still at Google, he tested the waters of tech investing by putting money into companies like Twitter and Photobucket, which sold to News Corp. Now Sacca plans to raise a venture fund that's smaller than a traditional fund, with assets less than $100 million.

He said traditional funds don't take into account that it's much less expensive to develop software these days and a big fund typically tries to force too much money on start-ups. For that reason, he envisions working with smaller companies that don't necessarily need human resources or an office. Investing like this "is the easiest way to approximate the kind of experience at the early Google--there's always cross pollination," he said.

Dave Watson

David Watson
Former software engineer,
now aspiring musician
David Watson figured it was time to leave Google when he couldn't leave home without his guitar pick. Apparently, enough money in the bank can put things into perspective.

Watson, 30, who has a computer science degree from the University of California in Santa Barbara and sounds more like a surfer than an engineer, joined Google in April 2000 when it still had fewer than 100 employees. In roughly six years at the company, he worked on everything from Froogle to Google's search appliance to the search engine itself--and he opened Google's office in Bangalore, India. Watson left in March 2006 to pursue his dreams in music.

Two years later, Watson is funding construction of a music studio in Oakland, Calif., that will be an incubator for young musicians in the Bay Area. The studio should be finished this summer. With luck, the yet-to-be-named music studio will deliver up the next Green Day or Watson himself. Since he left Google, he has been formally studying the blues and North Indian classical music, and he plans to work at the studio as a junior producer, songwriter, and musician.

As for the connection to Google, he said that the studio will approximate his early experience at the search giant, when it was a tightly knit group of people who collaborated on ideas. "I feel like Google upped my game. It was great to do what you wanted," he said. "Music making is a lot like engineering--it is a creative task."

Ron Garret
Lead engineer on first release of Adwords,
now filmmaker and investor
Ron Garret was a researcher for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab before he joined Google in June 2000 as employee No. 104. He never actually left his home in Pasadena, Calif., near JPL, when he took the job. But he flew to Google every week to help develop the first release of Adwords, Google's wildly successful ad platform. (Google rival Overture Networks, which was first to commercialize search, didn't respond to Garret about a job.) After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, air travel become more difficult for Garrett and he left the company after just more than a year, enough time for his first batch of shares to vest.

Garret said he made enough money so he doesn't have to pay the mortgage and he works part time as a venture capitalist with a small Santa Monica, Calif., firm called Funk Ventures. Garret still lives in Pasadena with his wife, and one day while walking his dog he met a homeless man who had lost his wife and kids in a drunken driving crash. That experience inspired him to make a movie about five homeless people living in Santa Monica called But for the Grace of God. In his words, he was the producer, cameraman, director, cinematographer, and chief bottle washer on the film. After editing it, he plans to take it to the film festival circuit in June.

"There seems to be a very prevalent feeling that all this money we've made must be put to socially responsible use," said Garret, who keeps up with former Googlers through several private e-mail lists. "They're all looking for causes--probably because we're all techno-geeks."