Twenty Years of Eric, Larry, and Sergey

I am frequently asked how long I think Eric, Larry, or Sergey will stick around at Google. Folks query, "Those guys have made unfathomable amounts of money and must have other things they would like to do with their time, no?"

I have never known how to respond to such a question. In my time there, I didn't ever get the sense any of the three of them wished they were doing anything other than their jobs at Google. Yet, there would seem to be some implicit limit as to how long a tenure you could expect from mere mortals, right?

Thanks to Adam Lashinsky's recent interview with Eric, Larry, and Sergey in Fortune, we no longer have to hazard a guess at their plans for staying on at the company:

Lashinsky: Will you all work at Google for the rest of your careers?

Schmidt: We agreed to work together for how long, gentlemen?

Brin: Twenty years.

Lashinsky: Really? When did you make that agreement?

Schmidt: Two years, seven months, and four days ago. But who's counting? Actually, we agreed the month before we went public that we would work together for 20 years. I will be 69, and according to Google I'm going to live to 84, so I should be fine.

Comments

[Keith Gordon]

That is priceless, but also somehow seems like exactly something these guys would do, never quite what is expected of them, and better than expected too.