The Google Story, a new book on the all-powerful search engine by The Washington Post reporter David A. Vise and former Bob Woodward research assistant Mark Malseed,
was released earlier this month by publisher Delacorte Press.
I've been looking forward to this book coming out for several months
now, in part because of my interest in Google for my work, but also
because Mark contacted me a couple of days after the Google
shareholders meeting in May, and we had an interview at a DC coffee
shop. A few months later, Mark was in touch again, this time to
let me know that I was quoted in the book and that I was about to
become one of the most famous Google investors in the country. (I
think I'm paraphrasing him correctly.) Naturally, I was
excited. It is flattering that David and Mark would choose to
include my thoughts on Google in their book.
Anyway, I finally received my copy of the book from Amazon, and I am quoted on pages 267-268. Other than the missing space from my last name (it should be De Cagna, but appears in the book as DeCagna), I'm pleased with my fifteen seconds of fame. (Yeah, I know Warhol said fifteen minutes, but this doesn't rate even that much time!) Here is the relevant section of the book, in which the authors are discussing the shareholders meeting:
The first person in line to enter the meeting was Jeff DeCagna [sic], a Google stockholder from Washington DC who worked as a consultant. He was impressed by the way Google controlled every aspect of the session and made sure that stockholders could wander the campus. Any one of them could have been a spy from a competitor. "I will continue to buy and hold," DeCagna [sic] said of Google stock. "It's cheap at $200 in my opinion. Great companies believe and invest in innovation because it's intrinsic to their success. If they continue to follow the management style, I think it could go to one or two thousand a share."
Pretty cool, huh? I have to confess that I have not started reading the book, so I'm not yet able to make it a TDI recommended reading. I have read both good and "less good" things about it in the few reviews I've seen, so I'll keep the jury out until I peruse the book myself. For now, however, I'm happy to have a few of my words shared with the Google-interested public!
P.S. Although I remain very bullish on Google, at $400 per share, I don't think of the stock as cheap any longer. I continue to believe the stock could see $1,000 per share, provided the company sustains its growth, doesn't get distracted by challenges such as Google Book Search or Google Analytics and, of course, chooses not to split the stock.
