Omid Kordestani

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Omid Kordestani
Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Business Development

Omid Kordestani is the Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Business Development. He is directly responsible for Google's worldwide revenue generation efforts as well as the day-to-day operations of the company’s sales organization. He joined in May 1999 as Google's "business founder," leading the development and implementation of the company’s initial business model. Since then he has brought Google to profitability in record time, generating more than $6 billion in revenue in 2005.

Omid has more than 20 years of high technology consumer and enterprise experience, holding key positions at several startups, including Internet pioneer Netscape Communications. As vice president of Business Development and Sales, he grew Netscape's online revenue from an annual run-rate of $88 million to more than $200 million in 18 months.

Prior to Netscape, he held positions in marketing, product management, and business development at The 3DO Company, Go Corporation, and Hewlett-Packard.

Omid received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1991 and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from San Jose State University in 1984.

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What Apple did for computers in 1984, Google is doing for advertising and business in the 21st century. How cool is a company that mastered Internet search and then drove well past it?

Google, by any measure, defined a new way of looking at so many industries. It personified and refined search. It brought real, tangible metrics to the advertising and search businesses. It continually evolves its product offerings to advertisers and consumers—often identifying the need beforehand. And it has achieved the holy grail by becoming a verb that defines a category, a la Xerox in the 1970s and FedEx in the '90s. What is truly amazing is that all these things are probably just appetizers before the main course.

Behind the scenes in Google's relentless thirst for more is Omid Kordestani, 42, its senior vice president for global sales and business development. He joined the company a year after it was established in 1998 as its "business founder" and helped build the brand into a household name in a way that excites Google's partners and confounds everyone else. Kordestani isn't as well known as Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page or even company CEO Eric Schmidt. But he has been the main brains behind Google's innovative and aggressive push to reach deals with a multitude of partners and make big money through advertising. Kordestani's deal in 1999 to provide search results to Netscape users and a similar partnership with Yahoo! the following year were just the beginning. His successful negotiations with AOL in 2002 yielded a watershed deal in the company's meteoric growth. Today he continues to drive the big ad deals.

In a post-dot-bomb society, you gotta love that Kordestani and the rest of the Google team didn't follow the folly of so many others and succumb to an IPO right away. They focused instead on the brand essence of Google. Of course, bringing the company to profitability in record time and generating more than $6 billion in revenue in 2005 probably didn't hurt either. Maybe that's why when Google finally did go public in late 2004, it blew the doors off everything else, and maybe that's a reason its stock—now at about $420 a share—may still hit $500. Wow.


http://img366.imageshack.us/img366/8840/kordestani05088uc.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

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Born: 1963
Education: B.S. in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State. MBA from Stanford University

Occupation: Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Field Operations, Google Inc.
Claim to Fame: Google


Biography
Early Career:

Omid Kordestani started his career in marketing, product management, and business development at The 3DO Company, Go Corporation, and Hewlett-Packard. Kordestani joined Netscape as director of OEM Sales. During his four-year stay at Netsape, he was able to establish major accounts with clients such as Citibank, AOL, Amazon, Intuit, Travelocity, Intel, @Home, eBay, and Excite. While at Netscape, Kordestani grew the company's website revenues from $88 million per annum to more than $200 million per annum within 18 months.

Innovative Googling:

In 1999, Kordestani joined Google. From years of Internet experience, Kordestani knew to avoid annoying pop-up ads and intrusive flash banners. He implemented the idea of selling paid listings. He found this to be a simple, yet effective, method which had been perfected by rival Overture. Paid listings work as follows: sponsors pay for rights to specific keywords: when a user enters a keyword, a related sponsor appears alongside the search results. Kordestani believes that the right relationships create the most effective business solutions. He once refused a multimillion-dollar deal because the fit had not been right. He looks for quality int he form of repeatable and sustainable revenue from a long-term customer.

At Google, he is given one of the most challenging and difficult jobs: revenue generation. Today, as Vice President of Business Development and Sales at the company, Kordestani leads a global team of 90 sales people. With a 1.9% stake in the company and a pending IPO in 2004, Kordestani will have more than strong ad revenues to be smiling about. Analysts estimate the company to be worth somewhere between $20 and $30 billion.

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Omid Kordestani's commencement Address at San Jose State University: "It is a privilege to be here with you today at your commencement — and the 150th anniversary of this very special institution.

I remember sitting in this same stadium for my graduation ceremony at San José State University back in 1984 — and I know very well that I face a big challenge today, as most of you may not remember a single thing I say today. I figured I have two options — I can talk about you or I can talk about me. I realize if I talk about me, the subject is of great interest to me — but maybe not to you. So I will try to only talk about me as it relates to you..."

YouTube - Omid Kordestani's Commencement Address at SJSU

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Affairs of the heart are never easy for outsiders to understand. But when they stray into the office, they, alas, become everyone's business. Which is why we asked, a while back, which Googler had put his marriage at risk over an affair with a coworker. As commenter notelling correctly guessed after we ran a blind item, it's Omid Kordestani, Google's top sales executive. Kordestani's no mere sales guy, however. For one, he's worth $2.2 billion, thanks to his Google shares. And inside the Googleplex, he's referred to as the company's "business founder," responsible for the fabulously successful money machine that is AdWords. With his stunningly beautiful and intelligent wife, Bita, shown above to the left, Kordestani might seem to have it all. But all was not enough.



Kordestani's new love, as is widely known within Google, is Gisel Hiscock, a New York-based finance director for the company.

Before you commenters say it, allow me: Yes, her last name is singularly unfortunate. But since Hiscock joined Google in 2003, before its lucrative IPO, it's unlikely that she's after Kordestani for his money. One imagines she might be more interested in obtaining a new surname.
But back to business. One tipster describes Hiscock's role as "sales finance," a group that now reports to Google's CFO, not Kordestani. Hiscock, however, has been at Google since 2003, and at one point sales finance reported to Kordestani. It's not clear when the affair began, but it's possible that Hiscock was Kordestani's employee at the time. And Kordestani, given his importance to the company, holds unspoken authority within Google that reaches beyond his direct line of command.