Comment by qcnguy

Eh no not really. Google's early success came from PhD dropouts (Larry Page & Sergey Brin), combined with people like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat (formerly at DEC), and the lesser known but no less critical Eric Veach (formerly Pixar).

Those are the people behind the core innovations that made Google so powerful: PageRank, MapReduce, BigTable, the indexing pipeline, protobufs/Stubby, GFS, AdWords, AdSense and the use of ML in both (iirc Veach was a key reason the ads system worked so well).

So none of the names I associate with early Google were academics. They all came from industry.