Google is portraying itself in its IPO documents as a fast-growing young company that is "managed…differently." There are grandiose statements that "our goal is to…improve the lives of as many people as possible," challenges to "the standard structure of public ownership," and a commitment to "take the long term view" -- even if it upsets securities analysts.

But if you look closely at the areas that matter in any company's operations and personality -- the dissemination of power and money -- you discover that Google isn't really different from many other tightly-run and successful emerging businesses. It is at once highly controlling and focused.

AUTHOR! AUTHOR!  Call me a cynic, but I've been around enough fast-growing companies to become suspicious when I see them laying the platitudes on in the way that Google's prospectus does. In particular, there's the Letter from the Founders that has captured so much attention because it refers to the top executives by their first names and is written in plain English.

Those are nice departures from the norm, but the part of the letter that caught my eye is a section that describes the roles of CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It reads in part: "To facilitate timely decisions, Eric, Sergey, and I meet daily to update each other on the business and to focus our collaborative thinking on the most important and immediate issues…This works because we have tremendous trust and respect for each other and we generally think alike…Eric, Sergey and I run the company without any significant internal conflict, but with healthy debate…"

Now, isn't that special. As nice as "collaborative thinking," "trust," "respect," and "healthy debate" may be, it's the letter's format that caught my attention. It's billed as coming from "the founders," but it really comes from Larry Page, one of the two founders.

CLASS CONFLICT.  Well, maybe they just did that for stylistic reasons, I figured, since the letter is signed by both men. But then, if you look deep in the prospectus at the list of executives and the number of shares each owns, lo and behold, Larry Page owns 38,593,700 shares and Sergey Brin owns 38,490,304 shares. Thus, Larry owns 103,396 more shares than Sergey. So the cynic tells me that for all the talk about "trust" and "healthy debate," when push comes to shove, Larry gets the final say. In this case, he chose to author the letter from "the founders."

Now, the authorship of a letter may have more to do with symbolism than the prospect of Larry throwing his weight around. But if these two ever lose the "trust" and "respect" they now revel in, and have a real food fight, you know who will likely come out on top.

There is one power issue that likely was the result of "collaborative thinking" and it is the establishment of two classes of stock. The public will be sold shares of Class A stock, but the power will reside with the Class B stock -- the stock Sergey, Larry, Eric, and other executives and directors (Wayne, John, Arthur, Michael, et. al.) will retain.

Issuing two classes of stock is one of the oldest stratagems for making sure power resides where the founders want, which is usually with themselves. Family companies are notorious for using the two-class stock system to give nonfamily and in-laws the feeling they have ownership, while keeping the real power with the class of stock owned by the family founders.

Okay, so we know that Larry and Sergey are control freaks. What does that prove? George Steinbrenner is a control freak as well, but the bottom line is that he produces winners.

THE BOTTOM LINE.  How do they run the company? The simple answer is that they seem to run a tight ship. Larry and Sergey each made a base salary last year of $150,000, with $206,000 in bonuses. And they were smart enough to pay Eric Schmidt, the CEO, more than themselves -- $250,000 of base salary, plus a $301,000 bonus. For a company with nearly $1 billion of revenue last year, the executive compensation is quite modest. Equally impressive is that directors haven't been receiving cash compensation. Yes, the stock they received in the past is now quite valuable, but it wasn't always that way.

Perhaps most impressive is one statistic that hasn't received a great deal of attention: last year's $961.9 million of revenue, when apportioned among Google's 1,907 employees, translates into more than $500,000 revenue per employee. That is a hefty number for a young fast-growing company -- a number likely to grow substantially as the company cashes in further on its dominance of online information retrieval.

Google may want to imagine itself as some kind of revolutionary managerial entity, but it seems to be more a modern-day money machine. Nothing wrong with that, so long as people understand what they are getting -- and what they're not getting.

David E. Gumpert is the author of Burn Your Business Plan: What Investors Really Want from Entrepreneurs and How to Really Start Your Own Business. Readers can e-mail him at david@davidgumpert.com


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