The time has come for me to go all in on decentralization.
After 10 years at Google, it’s time for me to say goodbye. Today, March 26th 2024, is my last day as a Googler – scary and exciting!
I learned a lot from all the great people I worked with throughout the years.
Seeing how such a beast works from within was amazing, the sheer scale of it all. I’m fortunate that I got to learn the inner workings of one of the biggest tech marvels in existence, where a lot of the foundational infrastructure that has scaled the web was invented.
In early 2021, I got hooked by the crypto space starting with ArtBlocks. Seeing what blockchains and smart contracts could do for builders and creators was inspiring, even if the tech was in its infancy. It felt like the beginning of the web I experienced as a kid.
Google was born in those days, the days of the original decentralized web.
However, the web has changed a lot since then. Especially with platforms such as Facebook and X that just want to keep you and your data in there.
Google itself had to evolve as well since, in many cases, users just want an answer and don’t want to go hunting for it within many websites. The introduction of knowledge panels, web answers, oneboxes and other such features made Search more useful at the expense of sending traffic to other sites. I joined Google right around the time of this transition and worked with teams trying to figure out how to measure quality for these new features.
Providing answers instead of just linking to other sites has its pros and cons since it’s a better user experience but then folks that put content online get less traffic. The problem is getting worse with LLMs since tools like ChatGPT generate information based on the web’s content without pointing back at the source, some, like Perplexity, do cite sources but I suspect few people visit them.
This will cause havoc to the fabric of the web. Although, to be honest, the web was already really broken by sites trying to game SEO and maximize ad impressions.
AI can simplify the user experience but it won’t fix the fabric of the web, it can actually make it worse and make walled gardens even stronger since they can now package user generated content and sell it to the highest bidder (e.g. Reddit) or keep it all for themselves (e.g. X).
I truly believe that the solution lies in the decentralized stack (crypto, blockchains) that has been built in the past few years.
There’s still a long way to go, but the building blocks are starting to come together so we can set a new foundation with built-in provenance and incentives where all participants can be rewarded by their contributions to the system as a whole.
This might’ve been naive of me but I truly thought that Google could be persuaded to return to its roots of supporting the decentralized web since that’s where it was born. In late 2021 I looked for other Googlers that were interested in crypto/web3 and I built an internal community with over a thousand of them.
This led me to have discussions with leadership across many parts of Google. A new team was put together to explore the decentralized tech and several other parts of Google started exploring it as well; YouTube, Cloud and Search being the only ones with public announcements/launches.
Unfortunately due to the FTX drama, the bear market and the rise of ChatGPT, most of the work in the decentralized space was deprioritized. The only thing I worked on that saw the light of day was the feature that lets you check crypto balances for a given Ethereum wallet on Google.com.
In the summer of 2023 I was transferred to work on AI related projects in Google Labs. I had mixed feelings about it but I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the AI space. However, the work we were doing was not for me, and my heart was still in the decentralized space.
So here I am, taking the plunge.
Those golden handcuffs were freakin’ strong… but I have taken them off… It's exciting!
The web is changing, there is no doubt about it. Companies like The Browser Company, Perplexity, Humane, Rabbit and others are starting to experiment on new ways to interact with computers and the web.
This is an area I’m deeply excited to explore but, unlike others that are just thinking about AI, I aim to reshape the fabric of the web powered by decentralized protocols. We can truly reimagine the web, blurring the lines between creator, user, and developer, empowering them with ownership and control.
The future of the web will be bright, it won’t be easy but we’ll make it happen.
I’m planning on playing a big role in it so stay tuned! I’ll be sharing more about my thoughts and my journey on programmista.com and Farcaster.
It’ll be a big undertaking and I can’t do it alone.
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P.S. I shared the following brief goodbye post within Google, thought I’d share it here as well.
