Google Grabs Former Yahoo Ari Balogh En Route to StumbleUpon
The Web discovery start-up StumbleUpon has hired Japjit Tulsi, who was previously a director of engineering at Google, as its VP of engineering, filling the role it had previously tried to give to former Yahoo CTO and EVP Products Ari Balogh.
Context & Ripple Effects
The hire closes a loop that has been running since at least December 2007, when Yahoo lost performance chief Steve Souders to Google and Silicon Alley Insider asked whether Yahoo was draining down to zero. Ari Balogh, who ran products and technology as Yahoo's CTO before leaving, had been StumbleUpon's choice to fill its vacant VP of engineering seat — Google intercepted him instead.
StumbleUpon's fallback, Google engineering director Japjit Tulsi, extends a pattern the discovery-and-social corner of the web knows well: in November 2009 Digg filled its own VP product role by poaching a Google executive. The consumer-web startups competing with Google socially are staffing themselves largely out of Google's engineering bench — or trying to, and losing the round.
First-order effects
- StumbleUpon gets a VP of engineering in Japjit Tulsi only after losing its first choice to Google, meaning the startup settles for its second candidate while its direct competitor strengthens itself with the same search.
- Ari Balogh moves from a Yahoo alumni track into Google's engineering organization, adding a former Yahoo CTO and EVP Products to the company already siphoning Yahoo's technical leadership.
Second-order effects
- Rival discovery and social startups such as Digg face the same recruiting market StumbleUpon just did: when Google wants a candidate, startups must pay up or pivot to second-choice hires from the same Google pool.
- Yahoo's continued export of senior technologists — Souders in 2007, Balogh now — pushes it further toward being a talent supplier to Google rather than a peer competitor for engineering leadership.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google functions as both the destination for departing Yahoo executives and the recruiting pool for every venture-backed social or discovery startup hiring engineering VPs, concentrating senior web-engineering judgment inside one company.
- Startups that repeatedly lose their first-choice candidates to platform giants may increasingly build engineering leadership from smaller companies or acquisitions rather than head-to-head recruiting contests they cannot win.
The trend: Senior web-engineering talent is flowing one-way toward scale — from Yahoo to Google and from Google to the startups challenging it — with Google able to win both directions of the trade.