Welcome! Above is a pic of the dessert served at Google's 2012 annual shareholder meeting. (Thank you, Larry, Sergey, and Eric!) I've attended many Bay Area shareholder meetings (see right hand side of blog, about a third of the way down), and I used to blog in detail about Google's annual shareholder meetings. The company now uploads them on YouTube, so a blog post seems redundant; however, if you're interested in some older reviews, here is one from 2009 and another review from 2010. I miss the more informal earlier meetings, when it was just Sergey Brin and Larry Page on two stool chairs answering questions. Of course, back then, fewer shareholders attended.
One tidbit you may not pick up from the video--almost everyone who attended is a senior citizen or retired. (The meeting usually starts around 2:00PM, which means almost no one can attend except for retirees.) This year, the meeting was fairly uneventful. Neither Larry Page nor Sergey Brin attended. We had one shareholder who liked the fact that Google stood up to China, said he used to be in the Air Force, and ended his spiel saying how he would deal with China: "Bomb them." He didn't look like he was joking. I asked the executives to better fine-tune the captioning features on YouTube videos. I've noticed that except for a few Khan Academy videos, the captioning feature is almost worthless. Most of the words are not consistently transcribed, and over the past two years, the captioning feature hasn't improved much. I asked Mr. Schmidt to imagine a world where he had a grandchild who was deaf, and the grandchild would one day come to him and say, (paraphrase) "I love the internet, but I can't fully engage with it. Was there something you could have done back in 2011, 2012, and 2013 to fix this?" I said I hoped he would be able to give his grandchild a satisfactory answer.
Anyway, if you're interested in more shareholder reviews, scroll about a third of the way down the right hand side of this blog. You will see plenty of firsthand accounts of various shareholder meetings, including Berkshire Hathaway, Disney, Electronic Arts, Apple, Starbucks, and more. The rest of the blog discusses diverse topics, including economics, politics, law, India, little-known films, and even Mark Twain.
1 comment:
I, for one, love your blogs on shareholder meetings. Regardless of the fact that the meeting is posted on Youtube, your insights into how shareholders are treated, the ability to ask questions, and of course the quality/quantity of the food being served shined a unique light on this often overlooked, but important aspect of being a public company. You have attended more of these meetings than anyone I know - don't discount your tribal knowledge of these beasts at a time when Google & Facebook are consolidating voting power to the CEOs and away from shareholders!
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