Dodge's home is in New Hampshire, but he's only there four or five days a month. He can often be found in Google's Mountain View and Boston offices, but last week he was at the Launch conference in San Francisco, this week he's at IDG's DEMO conference in Palm Desert, Calif., and soon he'll be on his way to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.

You'd think startups would be begging to talk to Google, but if they're innovative enough, that's not necessary. Don Dodge will find them. "Over the course of these events, I'll see 250 to 300 startups," Dodge says. "You never know what you're going to find. You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. We'll look at anything, but the sweet spot is mobile, location-based services, social, e-commerce, that kind of stuff."

At Redmond, Dodge was involved with about 30 companies that were eventually purchased by Microsoft, including Onfolio, Powerset and FAST, whose search technology is now integrated with SharePoint.

At Google, "there are some in the works, but acquisitions take time," Dodge says. Google bought 40 companies last year, and Dodge refers some of his startups to Google's mergers and acquisitions group. But there are plenty of ways Google can help a new vendor without purchasing it.

"I think there are several levels when we see companies," Dodge says. "The first one is can we partner with them. Can they build applications on our platform, and make the platform more valuable. The second level is can we do a business development deal with them, or a licensing type of deal. The third level is acquisition, and then there's even a fourth one which is , the venture capital arm of Google. We may find companies we want to invest in."