From Startups to Billionaires The Google Story

Most people use Google every day, many times a day, but few know how it began. It all started with capital and innovation central Stanford, where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met on a campus tour. Both men in their 20s, Sergey Brin was the guide and Larry Page was on the tour. Apparently they did not get along at this initial meeting but Larry Page accepted the invitation to study at Stanford. Less than a year later, they were studying together in a computer science grad program, the beginning of a very profitable friendship.

In the computer dark ages, 1996, when AOL was gaining popularity, Larry and Sergey cooperated on a project called “BackRub”, an early search engine. The search engine was launched internally and used to search Stanford’s intranet for a year before getting shut down in the days of limited bandwidth. The pair don’t give up, instead renaming their product -Google- a word derived from very nerdy math lingo. They persuade one of Sun Microsystem’s founders into a $100k in seed money before they’ve even launched.

In September 2008 Google started getting serious; they rented an office, incorporate their business, hire a classmate from the Stanford program, set up a bank account in Google’s name : and they’re off! At this point, Google was competing in a large market. It had to contend with Dogpile, AOL, Lycos, Magellan, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Yahoo, HotBot and AskJeeves.

While these companies endured numerous machinations and mergers, Google was gaining ground. Google was growing, and attracting media attention over their excellent search results. In 1999 Google expanded their hiring to include some administrative staff, and shortly thereafter won a huge $25 million dollar round of venture backing from a couple Silicon Valley venture firms and offered an IPO at $85 per share.

From there, the rest is history. Google continues to gain momentum from a playful, ‘fun to work here’ company culture, an increasing stream of technological advances, media attention, acquisition and crucial partnerships.
Is there a moral to the story? Unfortunately, nothing particularly helpful stands out. Page and Brin had a great idea, excellent connections, persuasive capabilities in pitch meetings, hard work, and didn’t give up after the first try. In many ways it sounds like a standard American social mobility tale, and yet in this case produced one of the most powerful companies in the world.

Their most crucial advantage was of timing and being able to think differently. Google was creating solutions for problems in digital information management before the problem even had the infrastructure to exist yet. In this way, Google helped to bring about the very information age it sought to manage, and was perfectly positioned to do so.

By Amelia Timbers