When asked about the AI talent wars, Google’s head of Android, Sameer Samat, said the competition to recruit top talent has always been intense — and he speaks from experience.
Before leading Google Shopping and eventually overseeing the Android ecosystem, Samat, was a tech startup founder in his early 20s. In the midst of the dot-com boom, he found himself trying to persuade his cofounders to stick with the machine-learning company they had built together.
“A couple of them were on to go to grad school, and we had a big fight about it,” Samat said in an interview with Business Insider. “I said, ‘I don’t understand how you can want to go to grad school; we’re building this company.’”
His next move shaped the course of his career.
Samat sent a cold reach out to Sergey Brin in the middle of the night, asking the Google cofounder for advice. At the time, he didn’t know Brin personally, but he had read Brin’s research papers and held a deep level of respect for the company.
“This is 1999 3 a.m. email,” Samat said, adding that he asked Brin, “‘What would you do in this situation? I’m sure you had this wrestle with this grad school decision.’”
Samat said that Brin answered a minute later saying was familiar with the problem and inviting him to Google’s offices. Samat then went to visit Brin and they talked for a bit before the cofounder “paraded one engineering person after another into the room.”
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He ended up doing the Google interview on the spot, Samat said.
Following the impromptu interview rounds, Samat said Brin offered him a job at the search giant. While Samat said he was flattered by the offer, he told Brin he was committed to his startup and didn’t want to leave his cofounders behind.
Brin respected the decision but gave him a piece of advice: If he was going to pursue his own company, he needed to do it properly, which meant securing solid financing, Samat told BI.
Samat said that Brin was “super kind with his time,” and went on a long walk with him even after Samat declined the job offer. Brin ended up introducing him to several people, some of whom went on to invest in the startup, called Mohomine.
“He didn’t have to do any of that,” Samat said. “And so I try to pay that forward, too, when people call me up with something similar.”
Samat went on to sell his company to Kofax, a public company at the time, now known as Tungsten Automation — and he ended up eventually coming to Google in 2008.
Samat said he made the right decision by sticking with his startup because he learned “a whole bunch of things,” ultimately making him a stronger contributor when he joined Google. Operating with limited resources as a founder, he said, helped him gain valuable experience that played a key role in his success.
When it comes to deciding whether to go to grad school, Samat told BI it’s a personal choice, and it might be right for some people.
Years later after his startup was acquired, Samat did a program at Harvard Business School where he took MBA classes for a few months. He said he learned “a tremendous amount,” but after studying strategy from an MBA perspective, he could talk himself out of almost any business plan.
“There is no substitute for taking a pretty good plan and just running like hell,” Samat said. “And sometimes the naiveness of someone who doesn’t have that background makes a much better entrepreneur.”
Samat said the decision to “do your own thing” and follow what excites you is the most important.
When Samat received his second job offer from Google in 2008, he was initially hesitant, as he was weighing the idea of starting another company at the time. It was Marissa Mayer, one of Google’s first engineers, who finally persuaded him, suggesting Google could be the place where he met his next cofounder. Others he interviewed with, including Sundar Pichai, then VP of product management, “were all wickedly smart,” Samat said.
“I thought, I bet I can learn a lot here,” Samat told BI.
Google’s chase for Samat didn’t quite end there. After joining in 2008, he left Google in 2015. When Pichai became CEO, he called Samat and asked him to come back. Samat said he was like a “work big brother,” and someone he went to for product advice.
“When he asked if I would come back to work with him on Android and Google Play, it was an easy decision,” Samat said. “It was a call that you don’t get often in your life.”