Google+ founder Vic Gundotra gets a fresh start

Vic Gundotra, the guy who created Google+, doesn't want to talk too much about it.

After more than a year of traveling — London, Montreal, Hawaii — and spending time with family, Gundotra announced Wednesday — on his Google+ page, of course — that he is returning to the tech world as CEO of AliveCor, a health startup that has received FDA approval to use smartphones and tablets to detect heart conditions.

He claims to have had no second thoughts about working in tech after leaving Google. He was just waiting to find a small team doing something worthwhile.

"Ever since I left Google, the offers have always come in pretty consistently, but it's pretty hard to get me excited to go do something," Gundotra says. AliveCor, while a big step removed from working on building a social network, nonetheless got him excited because of his interests in machine learning and wearable health. It also appealed to him on a more personal level.

"I've witnessed my father have two heart attacks," he says. "I really have a deep understanding and compassion for people who have these issues."

In its release announcing the hiring of Gundotra, AliveCor touts his "years of experience spanning consumer and technology products," but chooses not to mention the specific products he's known for, i.e. Google+.

One thing becomes clear: even though most of Silicon Valley is still baffled by the failure of the social network, Gundotra doesn't want to dwell on the past.

He ticks off a long list of accomplishments from his years at Google: growing the mobile team, bringing turn-by-turn navigation to Google Maps, leading the team that built voice navigation.

Only after all that does Gundotra, the man most known in the technology world (for better or worse) as The Father of Google+, touch on his work with the unfortunate social network.

And when he does, it's to talk about photos, rather than, you know, the actual social networking part.

"Even looking at Google+," he says on the phone, "looking at things like the photos product with deep machine learning. I don't think there's another product you can go into and say, 'Show me my dog on the beach.'"

That may be true, but hardly what Gundotra set out to build.

Five years ago, Gundotra was the executive pushing Google CEO Larry Page to finally figure out social media and build a competitor to Facebook, for fear of losing advertisers and employees. As one source from that era told Mashable in an earlier interview, "Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill us. Facebook is going to kill us.'"

Under Gundotra's leadership, Google pulled together 1,000 employees from various departments to whip together a competitive social network. Launched in 2011, Google+ received plenty of press and an initial burst of activity, but failed to differentiate itself enough from Facebook and Twitter.

Gundotra left the company early last year. Google+ was later split up into pieces: Photos and Streams.

In the year since Gundotra left Google and stayed out of the limelight, the verdict on Google+ fluctuated between partial failure and total failure. Even Google's general counsel referred to the social network earlier this year as being part of a "painfully long list of unsuccessful Google products."

Gundotra declines to respond to the negative feedback or to re-evaluate his leadership at Google+ and the social network he helped build.

"I’m concentrating on looking forward. I'll let Google comment on what they’re doing," he says. "I couldn’t be prouder of the people and the teams that I’ve worked with in the past."

Source Mashable