Google Founder Awards

If your a Google employee, and missed out on the IPO madness, fear not.  The new "Google Founder Awards" will reward employees that work on outstanding projects.  These awards will be in addition to already existing incentive programs and may given as frequently as once per quarter.  Why were they created?  Glad you asked.

Mr. Brin said a large part of the reason for creating the award was to give people incentives to apply for jobs at Google even after the promise of getting rich from the company's initial public offering last August had passed.

"Grads coming out of school now might want to go to Google, but want to be rewarded based on the success of their project," he said. Google already offers bonuses and options, he said, "but not to the scale where you can legitimately claim it's comparable to doing a start-up."

The first awards were given in November to two teams of approximately a dozen members each.  In total they received restricted stock worth about $12M.

Nice...

[via NY Times]