Owning the Oil Fields of the Internet
I made my first investment in Google back in 2015—not because I was a tech evangelist, but because I’d come to deeply understand how powerful search really was.
The genius of Google wasn’t just that it ranked web pages.
It was that it turned attention—the scarcest commodity in the digital economy—into a bidding war.
If you wanted top billing on a search results page, you paid for it. If you didn’t pay, you didn’t show up. And if you didn’t show up, you didn’t win.
Scarcity of position on the world’s most used interface became the most valuable real estate in advertising.
That one insight became the cornerstone of Google’s advertising empire.
Keywords as a Scarcity Engine
What struck me at the time was that keywords were a monetized auction on human intent.
Think about it:
- People type exactly what they want into a search bar.
- Google surfaces the most relevant results and ads.
- Advertisers bid more and more to win those clicks.
It’s a pure-margin engine—and one that compounds.
What Amazon does with purchase data, Google does one step earlier: it monetizes desire.
And unlike most businesses that face commoditization over time, Google’s search ad business has gotten stronger with scale. More users, more data, better relevance, higher bids.
It’s the perfect feedback loop.
Alphabet’s ‘Other Bets’ Weren’t Distractions—They Were Foresight
As I matured in my investing, I looked further under the hood—particularly at Google’s so-called “Other Bets.”
That’s when I realized: this wasn’t just an advertising company. This was a moonshot factory backed by the world’s best data science engine.
- They knew AI was coming long before it was trendy.
- They were acquiring and integrating data from YouTube, Android, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, and more.
- They had the compute (TPUs), the frameworks (TensorFlow), and the infrastructure (Cloud/Azure hybrid).
Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page were building a foundational empire for the data age.
What others called “Other Bets,” I came to see as venture-style R&D with asymmetric potential:
- Waymo for autonomous driving
- DeepMind for foundational AI
- Verily and Calico for health tech
- Google X for next-gen hardware
Not all of these will work. But they don’t need to. Google Search alone funds an innovation portfolio that rivals entire VC funds.
Data as the New Oil—And Google Owns the Fields
At some point over the past decade, the analogy became clear to me:
Data is the new oil.
But not all data is equal.
What matters is contextualized, indexed, relevant data.
And no one has more of it than Google.
- Billions of searches per day
- Billions of hours of video watched
- Billions of emails, docs, messages, and maps
- All indexed. All retrievable. All trainable.
When AI began its explosive breakout in 2022–2025, Google already had the fuel—and the refinery.
Now the company is arming itself for the next battles: foundational models, quantum compute, and ambient computing.
Still Bullish, Ten Years On
Today, I hold Google in my G1 Fund (Core Compounders)—a long-term, high-confidence investment I rarely touch.
The business is still growing. It’s still scaling. And it’s still protected by one of the strongest moats on the planet.
More importantly, I believe we’re only in Act II of Google’s journey. If Act I was the internet, Act II is AI. And Act III will be ambient intelligence that surrounds our lives invisibly.
When you snap your fingers and try to imagine a world without Google, everything stops:
- Maps
- Documents
- Calendars
- Search
- Video
- Android
- Chrome
It fails the “Snap Test”—and that’s exactly why I continue to own it.
