Kevin Rose's Next Move: Partner at Google Ventures
Kevin Rose, who joined Google in March to work on Google+ along with some of his team from mobile app incubator Milk, has moved to Google Ventures. — Rose is now a venture partner at the firm focused on making new investments, and he has already moved internally.
Context & Ripple Effects
Kevin Rose has been at Google for barely ten weeks. The March hire — reported first by AllThingsD when he agreed to join Google — put the Digg founder and his team from Milk, his 2011 mobile app incubator, on Google+. Business Insider's read at the time was that the real prize was design talent, not product output.
The move to Google Ventures reframes the deal: rather than shipping inside Google+, Rose now sits on the investing side, where Google Ventures had already built out its seed-stage Startup Lab the year before. The pickup across CNET, VentureBeat, Engadget and Business Insider shows how much attention follows Rose personally, independent of which desk he occupies.
First-order effects
- Google Ventures gains a venture partner whose value is deal flow and founder credibility from Digg and Milk, not a traditional finance background.
- The Google+ product effort loses Rose and whatever Milk teammates came over with him in March, after roughly two months.
Second-order effects
- Seed-stage founders courting Google Ventures' Startup Lab now have a partner who has founded and sold consumer products twice, sharpening the firm's pitch against Sand Hill Road seed funds.
- Other corporate venture arms watching Google will note that hiring well-known founders is cheaper than acquiring their startups — and can be done twice for the same person.
Third-order effects
- If corporate investors keep converting founders into partners, corporate venture capital becomes less about balance-sheet returns and more about a talent-and-signals pipeline into the parent company — a structural blur between Google's M&A, HR, and investing functions.
The trend: Large companies are absorbing prominent founders directly into their venture arms, using investing roles to retain entrepreneurial talent that acquisitions alone would price too high.