Former Google CEO suffers for letting employees go home early

Google lost ground to competitors by allowing employees to leave the office early and work from home, the company’s former CEO said.

Eric Schmidt, who headed Google until 2011 and was its chairman until 2015, told students at Stanford University in April that the company was struggling to compete with new rivals like OpenAI because of its work culture.

“Google decided that work-life balance, leaving early and working remotely were more important than winning,” he said in a recording of the call posted on YouTube this week. “And the reason startups work is because people work like hell.”

The video has already been deleted.

After adopting remote work during the pandemic, Google is struggling to get employees back to the office.

Last summer, the company tightened its hybrid work policies, requiring employees to return to the office three days a week and including attendance at performance reviews.

The tech giant was surprised by the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot when it debuted in late 2022, sparking an AI arms race between the two companies to release new products.

Google later declared a “code red” internally as the company rushed to launch its own AI-powered chatbot tools and challenge ChatGPT.

Google has since developed its own competing AI offering, Gemini, but he made a series of embarrassing blunders since its inception – providing incorrect answers and generating historically incorrect and offensive images.

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Mr Schmidt, who has a net worth of $30bn (£23bn), said: “The fact is, if you all leave university and start a company, you’re not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete with other start-ups.”

Mr Schmidt, 69, later walked back his words, telling the Wall Street Journal he “misspoke.”

Mr. Schmidt also encouraged students not to worry too much about copyright regulations when establishing a start-up.

He told the students: “If TikTok gets banned, here’s what I propose to each of you: Tell your (AI) the following words: Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, in the next 30 seconds, create this program.”

He later added that Silicon Valley companies could simply “hire a whole bunch of lawyers to clean up this mess.”

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