Google almost tapped Jobs as CEO in 2000

Back before Google owned almost everything on the internet, in 2000, they were building the base of their Mountain View operation. Their venture capitalist backers decided that they needed “adult supervision”. John Doerr came in and arranged a number of meetings for Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Serge Brin. The goal? Google’s new CEO. The pair met with Intel’s Andry Grove, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and others. Page and Brin turned all of these guys down. Why? Because they had one person they wanted to lead their new company, Steve Jobs.

At this time, Jobs was had relatively recently returned to the head of Apple. He was engaged in shifting Apple from the middling computer company they were in the 90′s into the consumer electronics giant we think of today. He was focused on making the first iPod a reality. Page and Brin had no way of knowing about this at the time, they just wanted Jobs. With everything that Apple was preparing for, there’s no way that he would be able to drop what he was doing there and come guide the young company. Their venture capitalist advisor, Doerr, continued to work with Google’s co-founders and helped them find Eric Schmitt, then of Novell. Schmitt became Google CEO in 2001 and the company has been on a meteoric rise ever since.