CHAPTER
TWO
Starting in a
Garage
In early 1998, Bill Gates couldn’t envision what was
to come. Microsoft was at the apex of its power, with revenues that
would reach $14.5 billion by year’s end, with ever-rising profits,
a soaring stock valuation, more than twenty-seven thousand
employees, and a market share of computer operating systems that
encompassed more than 90 percent of all desk and laptop PCs. The
government had not yet sued it for monopolistic practices, or
convinced two federal courts that Bill Gates’s company was guilty.
At the time, Microsoft was so flush that it had flirted with
investing in Hollywood, having already dispatched its chief
technology officer and dealmaker, Nathan P. Myhrvold, to spend an
anthropological week with DreamWorks cofounder Jeffrey
Katzenberg.
It was in that
confident time that I visited Gates in his office on the sprawling
Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, in 1998. In the course of
our interview, I asked him to describe his competitive nightmare:
“What challenge do you most fear?” He rocked gently back and forth,
sipping from a can of Diet Coke, and silently pondered the
question. When he finally spoke he did not recite the usual litany
of prominent foes: Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Apple. Nor
did he cite the federal government. Instead, he said, “I fear
someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.” He
had no idea where the garage might be—or even what country it might
be in—nor could he guess the nature of the new technology. He just
knew that innovation was usually the enemy of established
companies.
As it happens, in
1998, in a Silicon Valley garage, Bill Gates’s nightmare came alive
courtesy of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Page and Brin had met three
years before, at orientation for incoming Stanford graduate
students. They had much in common. Their fathers were college
professors and their mothers worked in science; both were born in
1973 and raised in homes where issues were rigorously debated; both
attended Montessori elementary schools, where they were granted
freedom to study what they wished, and as public high school
students they were besotted by computers; both were pursuing
Ph.D.’s in computer science. They shared what John Battelle
described as “a reflexive belief that whatever the status quo is,
it’s wrong and there must be a better solution”; both, as Mark
Malseed observed, had a “penchant for pushing boundaries—without
asking for permission ...”
SERGEY MIKHAILOVICH
BRIN’S PATH to Stanford started in Moscow, where he was born into a
family steeped in science. His grandfather was a math professor;
his great-grandmother had left the Soviet Union to study
microbiology at the University of Chicago; his parents, Michael and
Eugenia, were mathematicians. There were obstacles to their pursuit
of science, though. Despite Michael’s Ph.D., anti-Semitism impeded
his career: at Moscow State University he was not permitted to
study his preferred subject, astrophysics, because it fell into the
same department as nuclear research, and Jews were deemed too
untrustworthy to enter that field. Eugenia Brin, a civil engineer,
was more welcome in the renowned research lab of the Soviet Oil and
Gas Institute, but she, too, felt constraints. “We were quite
poor,” recalled Sergey, describing a three-hundred- to
four-hundred-square-foot Moscow flat he shared with his parents and
his grandmother, an English teacher. “My parents, both of them,
went through periods of hardship. My life, in comparison, has been
easy.”
In 1977, Michael Brin
attended an international conference in Europe, and when he
returned home he insisted that the family must apply for visas to
escape the USSR. When he submitted an application the following
year, though, he was abruptly fired. Warned of retribution, Eugenia
quit her job. They eked out a life doing temporary work, schooling
four-year-old Sergey at home. It wasn’t until two years later that
their exit visas were granted. With assistance from the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society, they immigrated to America, leaving most of
their possessions behind.
They rented a
cinder-block house in a multiracial, working-class suburb of
Baltimore, near the University of Maryland. As in Moscow, they were
poor, relying on the support of local Russian Jews. “My parents
sort of lived in the dining room,” Sergey remembers. “There was no
wall between the dining room and the kitchen. They used that as
their bedroom.” Eventually, Michael became a professor of
mathematics at the University of Maryland, where he specializes in
Riemannian geometry; Eugenia Brin became a scientist at NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center. They had a second son, Sam, fourteen
years Sergey’s junior.
Sergey enrolled in
the local Montessori school where classes were comprised of
students in a three-year age range. Typical of Montessori programs,
the school adapted itself to the child. “It’s not like somebody is
telling you what to do,” Sergey said. “You have to plot your own
path.” Because he initially spoke little English, he retreated into
math puzzles, science projects, and maps. For his ninth birthday,
his parents gave Sergey a Commodore 64 computer, a seminal gift for
a man who now gleefully describes himself as a nerd. Some years
later, when a friend got an early Macintosh computer, they began to
devise artificial intelligence programs and software to simulate
gravity.
Sergey’s prowess at
math was encouraged by his father, a stern tutor, who sometimes
graded student papers with the salutation “My sincere condolences.”
Family meals featured intense discussions. Sergey was not much
interested in listening to music or watching TV Nor was he an avid
reader of books, though he was engrossed by the life of Richard P.
Feynman, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics who “not only made
big contributions in his field,” Sergey once said, but wanted to be
“a Leonardo, an artist” as well as a scientist. “I found that
pretty inspiring.” Although he says he “probably had more nerdy
interests than most of my peers,” his heroes—Feynman at a young
age, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett later—suggest the breadth of his
ambition.
He was also a
rebellious child. When he was thirteen, his parents took him to
visit the Soviet Union and he threw pebbles at Soviet policemen,
causing a scene that his parents defused only by pledging to the
irate authorities that he would be severely punished at home.
Sergey is still very emotional about autocratic governments and
anti-Semitism. But even though he was raised as a Jew and attended
Hebrew school for a few years, he was nonpracticing, did not have a
bar mitzvah, and was put off by traditional Jewish celebrations,
which he once told an Israeli reporter he “associated with getting
lots of gifts and money, and I was never comfortable with that.”
When he was married on an island in the Bahamas in May of 2007 to
Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of 23andMe, a genetics research company,
the couple stood in bathing suits under a chuppah, the traditional
Jewish wedding canopy, but no rabbi officiated.
Then, as now, he was
uncomfortable with introspection. Asked by the same Israeli
reporter if it was a coincidence that his wife was Jewish, he said,
“I believe there are lots of nice non-Jewish girls out there. My
wife is, I guess, half Jewish.”
So was it a
coincidence, the reporter pressed, that his wife was half
Jewish?
“That wasn’t a
concern for me,” he responded. “I don’t know, maybe it was for
her.”
I once asked him,
“What part of your success do you trace to qualities in your
parents?”
“It’s hard to say,”
he answered.
After much coaxing,
he added, “A certain love for science and learning and the
beautiful mathematical things I have been able to put into practice
is part of my upbringing.”
He attended Eleanor
Roosevelt High School in Baltimore, a public school where muscles
counted more than brains. This setting didn’t diminish Sergey’s
cocky swagger, though, and he blitzed through in three years,
gathering enough college credits there to allow him to also
graduate from the University of Maryland in three years. Although
he was just nineteen, Sergey flourished at college, where he was a
math and computer science major and was treated by the faculty as a
peer. “I was a pretty advanced student,” he said.
After graduation, he
received a National Science Foundation scholarship to study
computer science at Stanford, where he believed he was “better
prepared” than classmates. His special interest, data mining, was a
relatively new field in which computers are used to extract and
analyze information from enormous fields of data. He expected to
get a Ph.D. and maybe become a professor. As at Montessori, he
worked at his own pace. His father once told authors David Vise and
Mark Malseed for their book, The Google
Story, “I asked him if he was taking any advanced courses
one semester. He said, ‘Yes, advanced swimming.’” Craig
Silverstein, a fellow data-mining student who would become Google’s
first employee, remembers that Sergey rarely studied, yet “he
passed all his tests in the first year, and didn’t take any in the
second year. Already he had this reputation as a kind of genius.”
Brin recalled taking eight comprehensive tests: “When I first
tried, I passed all seven. The one I thought I was best at, I
didn’t pass. I went to the prof and debated the answers. I wound up
talking him into it. So I passed all eight. I think I was the only
one.”
Brin was athletic but
uninterested in team sports; he lost himself instead in gymnastics,
swimming, Rollerblading, and biking. Still, Brin was more outgoing
than many self-described geeks and enjoyed playing practical jokes.
He also took on extra projects that aroused his interest; a typical
project was the numbering system for the rooms in the Computer
Science Building (donated by Bill Gates, who would become a
nemesis). In the building, each room was identified with a
four-digit code, which Brin felt did not convey the most useful
information to the building’s tenants. “We were offended at having
four-digit numbers when you don’t have ten thousand rooms,” he
said. Along with computer science professor Vaughan Pratt, he set
out to devise a better system, one that would enable someone
leaving a given room to calculate the distance to his destination.
“We came up with a sensible three-digit numbering system. It was
quite elegant. Most buildings are numbered in a really stupid way.
The architect or somebody sits down with the blueprint and they
collate across and they number things. It looks great to them when
they are looking at the blueprint. When you’re actually walking
around, it makes no sense at all. The Gates building is fairly
simple. I just had the numbers roll around the building. Even
numbers were exterior, odd numbers were interior.... The second
digit told you how far around the building you had to go. It was
very intuitive, if I may say so myself.”
THE SERGEY BRIN WHO
was obsessed with efficiency would find a soul mate in Larry Page.
Larry was born in Lansing, Michigan, where his father, Dr. Carl
Victor Page, was a professor of computer science and artificial
intelligence at Michigan State. His mother, Gloria Page, had a
master’s degree in computer science; she taught at the university
before becoming a database consultant. With Larry and his older
brother, Carl, the Pages lived comfortably in a middle-class
neighborhood. By age seven, Larry was proficient on the Exidy
Sorcerer computer his dad had brought home, and this ignited his
interest in technology, as did the technical magazines and
electrical engineering assignments his father also brought home,
and his brother Carl’s skill at taking things apart. Larry’s
family, like Sergey‘s, welcomed argumentative challenges. The Pages
were readers, and Larry fondly remembers vacations to Oregon when
they’d take an empty suitcase to fill it with books from the
renowned Powell’s Books, in Portland. Unlike Sergey, however, he
was conspicuously quiet, and had a bad case of acne. He was a
loner, someone who as an adult friends would describe as shy and
strangers would describe as asocial. He chose not to follow his
mother’s faith, Judaism, but like his father chose not to embrace a
religion. Perhaps this was but one reflection of an unsettled home;
his parents divorced when he was eight, and his father married a
colleague at Michigan State. Carl, nine years older, left home
after high school to get a computer science degree. He later was a
founder of eGroups.com, an Internet company sold to Yahoo in
2000 for about four hundred million dollars.
Just as Sergey was
fascinated by Richard Feynman, Larry was inspired at age twelve by
a biography of Nikola Tesla, whose pioneering work led to the
development of electricity, power grids, X-rays, and wireless
communication. Tesla was an extraordinary but unsung scientist, an
Edison without the fame or wealth and who, despite his discoveries,
died bitter and destitute. Page told me he learned from Tesla that
“you can invent the world’s greatest things, but if you just invent
them it doesn’t accomplish that much.... I found it very sad. You
can imagine if he were slightly more skilled in business, or with
people, he’d have gotten a lot more done.” Brilliant ideas alone
would not suffice. Timing and follow-through, and raising
resources, really mattered.
“I realized I wanted
to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world,” Page once
said. He became convinced that in order to effect scientific change
he needed to start a business. Inventing things, he once said,
“wasn’t any good; you really had to get them out into the world and
have people use them to have any effect. So probably from when I
was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.” When he
thought about the kind of company he wanted, Larry told me, he
thought of his grandfather, an assembly-line worker in the
Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, who during sit-down strikes
fearfully carried a heavy iron pipe wrapped in leather as
protection from what he described as strike-breaking “goons.” Happy
employees, Larry came to believe, are more productive.
The rival for Larry’s
attention was music. He had begun playing the saxophone as a child,
and he played with considerable skill. After finishing his first
year at East Lansing High School, Larry was among the talented
musicians chosen to attend summer sessions at the prestigious
Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan. But the lure of
engineering soon triumphed over music. Like his father, mother, and
brother, Larry enrolled at the University of Michigan. He didn’t
have much choice. “My dad actually said to me when I was deciding
what school to go to, ‘We’ll pay for any school you want to go
to—as long as it’s Michigan,”’ he once said.
With his short dark
hair and stark black eyebrows and 5 o‘clock shadow, he looked like
Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, but his high-pitched voice made him
sound like Kermit the Frog. He remained an introvert while studying
engineering at the university. Nevertheless, he imagined that one
day he might start a company, and insisted on taking business
courses. He also stood out; a brilliant student, he served as
president of Eta Kappa Nu, a national honor society for electrical
and computer engineering students. Preoccupied with finding more
efficient ways to do things, he led a still nascent effort to build
a monorail that would replace forty buses to connect the North and
the Central Campus. He attended a leadership training program at
the university, where he encountered a slogan he would often repeat
as an adult: “Have a healthy disregard for the
impossible.”
For his graduate
studies, he had his heart set on Stanford, a university where even
the names of the buildings attest to the men whose careers were
spawned there: William R. Hewlett, David Packard, Jerry Yang, James
Clark. Yet for all of his ambition and achievements, he feared he
was not up to the task. “I kept complaining to my friends that I
was going to get sent home on the bus,” he once told Michigan’s
alumni magazine. “It didn’t quite happen that way.”
THE STANFORD CAMPUS,
designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, is spread over eight thousand
acres. Like the Google campus that Page and Brin would one day
build, Stanford offers free bus service, plentiful food, a bucolic
setting, and shared spaces where students can collaborate. By the
time Larry arrived in 1995, Sergey had been there two years; he was
on the orientation team that welcomed Larry to campus. Sergey, as
was his wont, immediately began needling Larry with questions. “We
argued a lot,” recalled Brin, mostly about local zoning and city
planning. The field didn’t particularly interest Brin, but arguing
did. “We ended up talking a lot.” The other students were content
to tour San Francisco; Larry and Sergey were curious about other
things. Even today, their idea of a relaxing time is to attend the
annual Consumer Electronics Show and ask questions about the cool
new technologies on display, or quiz astronauts about space
flight.
Larry found an
academic mentor in Terry A. Winograd, a computer science professor
who had won a National Science Foundation grant to explore the
future of online information. Larry bolted upright one night from a
dream, he said many years later when describing how he suddenly had
a vision for search. “I was thinking: What if we could download the
whole Web, and just keep the links.... I grabbed a pen and started
writing!” He told Professor Winograd, “It would take a couple of
weeks to download the Web.” Winograd nodded, he said, “fully aware
it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me.” Larry
downloaded the entire link structure of the Web, not quite knowing
what he’d do with it. He realized that links weren’t organic; they
were the result of conscious effort. In a sense, users were voting
for the best links when they chose to visit a site, or when they
included a link on their own site. He had a bold idea to craft a
different kind of search engine that would use these links to
catalogue not just an island of the Web but the entire
ocean.
His new friend Sergey
was intrigued. He had been working with computer science professor
Rajeev Motwani on data mining for the Web, still a nascent field in
which one had to collect links, print them out, and study the
printout to derive answers. The audacity of Larry’s effort appealed
to him. The math problems—how to count not just the original page
links but the links affixed to the links—were the kind of challenge
he tackled with gusto. “It was,” Brin said, understatedly, “an
interesting source of data.” Sergey signed on, and the two became
inseparable; when speaking of them, colleagues began to roll their
names together, LarryandSergey.
The two were working
at the dawn of the digital age. In 1993, two years before Brin and
Page met, a mere fifteen million people in fifty countries used the
Internet, and there were just over one hundred Web sites. The
Mosaic browser had just been introduced, and Linus Torvalds
empowered a community of software hackers to produce the
open-source operating system called Linux. But the digital world
was moving at breakneck speed, with the Internet doubling in size
every year. In 1995, just two years later, Yahoo was born, and its
major online competitor, AOL, had nearly five million subscribers;
the Mosaic browser had been renamed Netscape Navigator the prior
year, and did for the Internet what Lewis and Clark did to open the
West.
Mighty Microsoft was
late to spot the menace Netscape and the Internet posed to its
packaged software business. Microsoft’s misreading of the Internet
threat is conveyed in a sixteen-page November 15, 1994, memo to
Bill Gates from Myhrvold deriding the “hype” surrounding the
Internet, and asserting—just as dismissively as Sumner Redstone was
that same year in his speech to the National Press Club—that it was
just a distribution platform dominated by “hobbyists.” Although
Myhrvold presciently warned of the advent of a Web browser,
Microsoft was slow to comprehend the impact of the Netscape
browser, which liberated consumers from behind the walls AOL and
other portals erected, allowing them to surf the Web. When
Microsoft finally reacted, it was not tentative. Bill Gates
galvanized his troops with a May 1995 memo, “The Internet Tidal
Wave,” warning of this disruptive technology.
The year 1995 was
also when a Morgan Stanley analyst named Mary Meeker teamed up with
a fellow analyst, Chris DePuy, to author The
Internet Report, a thick volume that heralded a brave new
world. “In this report,” they wrote on page one, “we attempt to
describe what may be one of the hottest new markets to develop in
years—the growth of PC-based communications and the Internet.” They
said the “market for Internet-related products and services appears
to be growing” faster than such early media start-ups as printing,
telephones, movies, radio, recorded music, television. With a
multiplying base of about 150 million PC users, they predicted
e-mail “should become pervasive,” and the Internet would serve as
“an information distribution vehicle” for companies, slashing
costs, birthing new competitors—“the next Microsofts, Ciscos,
Oracles, and Compaqs....”
The report was viral.
The press heralded it. Companies downloaded more than a hundred
thousand copies from Morgan Stanley’s Web site. HarperCollins
published it as a book. Within days, Meeker received an e-mail from
someone who lived at Three Lighthouse Road in New Zealand—to thank
her. “He had a dial-up Web connection and he was able to connect to
me from a remote location,” she recalled. “This was the power of
the Internet. That was a magical moment, for it represented what
the report was about.” Barron’s would
dub Meeker “Queen of the Internet.” Wireless communications were
exploding, and that year Americans spent twenty-two billion dollars
on wireless services, as telephone companies and others vied to buy
spectrum space that would speed the digital
revolution.
Also that year,
Nathan Myhrvold wrote a memo to Bill Gates in which he drew a
distinction between incremental changes (like CD-ROMs or computers
that double in speed every year) and “revolutionary” sea changes.
He predicted computers that would be connected to networks, opening
markets for e-commerce, information services, and video on demand;
a “shift from a products business to a service business” that will
allow services to be downloaded rather than sold in packages,
opening the possibility that software companies like Microsoft
would be able to charge per transaction; and new multimedia
platforms that would permit the transmission of CD- quality audio
and crisp video pictures. He also predicted there would be a
radical change as we “move to an intelligent operating system,” an
intelligent agent or navigator that would free consumers to locate
what they want on their PC or the Web.
It was at places like
Stanford and in classes like Terry Winograd’s that these systems
might be designed. To tug his computer science students down from
their theoretical heights and ground them in a sense of “how things
work and an understanding of the user,” Winograd assigned them to
read Donald A. Norman’s The Design of Everyday
Things. The thesis of Norman’s book is that those who design
things—from video recorders to computers to impossible-to-open
plastic packages—typically don’t design from the vantage point of
consumers. Thus they make products that are overly complicated and
confusing. This, he wrote, is “the paradox of technology: added
functionality generally comes along at the price of added
complexity.”
This idea became an
obsession of Larry’s. Years later, he called it a “seminal” book,
and remembered being amazed when he first read it “that people are
so focused on outside things and are not focused on the
functionality of things.” (It still drives him mad to stay in a
hotel and not be able to figure out how to turn the lights off “in
less than three minutes.”) The book, he said, strengthened the
attitude he brought to designing the Google search engine, which
was the opposite approach from existing search engines like Alta
Vista. If you did a search for university on Alta Vista, it heaved at you every
text that contained the word university, without ranking value or
assessing whether people were actually using the links. Doing the
same search, Google relied on the collective intelligence of its
users and returned with the top ten universities. Thinking that
“your customer or users are always right, and your goal is to build
systems that work for them in a natural way, is a good attitude to
have,” Page said. “You can replace the system. You can’t replace
the user.”
Page and Brin wanted
to build an efficient search engine, one that didn’t waste users’
time. Efficient use of time was paramount for them. Neither Page
nor Brin eagerly read novels or went to many movies or concerts,
and they disdained games like golf that took too long to play.
Once, during the early days of Google, Time magazine had arranged to photograph Sergey in
a white lab coat. When the photo shoot ran over the allotted time,
Sergey abruptly called out, “Red alert,” and simply walked away
without explanation.
Page and Brin
together, it was said, were “two swords sharpening each other.”
They were not breathtakingly more brilliant than their peers, said
Winograd, observing that brilliance is commonplace among top
Stanford engineering students. What was unusual about them, he
said, was their boldness. “Page and Brin’s breakthrough,” writes
Battelle in The Search, his book on the
history of search, “was to create an algorithm—dubbed PageRank
after Larry—that manages to take into account the number of links
into a particular site, and the number of links into each of the
linking sites.” Instead of relying only on keywords as earlier
search engines had, PageRank did a link analysis, counting the
sites that were most frequently visited by users and jumping them
to the top of the search results. They believed this “wisdom of
crowds” approach was a more objective way of measuring which Web
pages were most vital. The goal was to get better answers to search
queries. They understood one big thing: They were establishing a
formula that would harness the growth of their search engine to the
growth of the Web. What they needed was massive computing power to
conduct lightning-fast searches, and huge servers to store the
millions of indexed Web pages.
In 1996, Larry Page’s
father, a polio victim as a child, died of pneumonia. He was only
fifty-eight. Bereft, Page threw himself into his project. To crawl
and index the Web required enormous amounts of Stanford’s computer
system, and Page and Brin were not shy about using it. Together, he
and Brin harassed the computer science department to grant them
extra resources. Terry Winograd, who worked on the project,
recalled that “they had more of a feel of teenage kids than most
graduate students—‘Don’t tell me what to do!’” Professor Rajeev
Motwani, who also worked on the project, said, “They didn’t have
this false respect for authority. They were challenging me all the
time. They had no compunction in saying to me, ‘You’re full of
crap!”’ He recalled, “The fondest memory I have of Sergey is of him
walking into my office when I was sitting at my desk and he would
say, ‘Bastard!’ That was the kind of thing he would do. Larry was
sitting outside. It was a joke. But behind the joke was that he
wanted something from me: more computer time.”
Once, Winograd said,
they snuck onto the loading dock where new Stanford computers were
delivered and “borrowed” them to expand their computing power. Page
and Brin brought a cart to transport the crates. Some years later,
Page confessed that their embryonic search engine in 1997 hogged so
much computer capacity that “we caused the whole Stanford network
to go down.”
The new search
engine, at first called BackRub, was an object of some secrecy.
Spurred by Page’s obsession with Tesla, who unwittingly gave away
his inventions by sharing them with others, Page and Brin zealously
guarded the algorithms that created PageRank. But as Ph.D.
candidates, they were expected to present their work, so to satisfy
Stanford’s academic requirements they agreed to deliver a paper in
January 1998. At the time it wasn’t clear whether they wanted to be
entrepreneurs or academics. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page
said. “We wanted to finish school,” as their fathers had. Page
remembered the words of Stanford professor Jeffrey Ullman, who
urged them to leave the university: “You guys can always come back
and finish your Ph.D.’s if you don’t succeed.” This argument
ultimately proved persuasive, but not before the paper was
delivered.
The database they
discussed consisted of 24 million Web pages; a typical search took
one to ten seconds. They chose the name Google to replace BackRub
because, they said, “it is a common spelling of googol, or
10100 and fits well with our goal of
building very large-scale search engines.” (Actually, they wanted
to name it Googol but that domain name was taken. They also thought
of The Whatbox, Brin said a few years later, but “we decided that
Whatbox sounded like Wetbox, which sounded like some sort of porn
site.”) Their paper stated that their search technology offered
“two important features that help it produce high precision
results. First, it makes use of the link structure of the Web to
calculate a quality ranking for each web page. This ranking is
called PageRank.... Second, Google utilizes” links—518 million
hyperlinks at the time—to make maps that “allow rapid calculation
of a web page’s ‘PageRank.’” They presented some calculations to
describe how they approximated “a page’s importance or
quality.”
Page and Brin’s paper
was attempting to advance a belief that both their fathers had
passed on to them: artificial intelligence (AI) was the next
scientific frontier. The search engine would supplement the limited
human brain. “Brin and Page,” Nicholas Carr would write years
later, “are expressing a desire that has long been a hallmark of
the mathematicians and computer scientists who have devoted
themselves to the creation of artificial intelligence.” They were
following the lead of René Descartes, the French
philosopher/mathematician who four centuries ago argued that “the
body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking,” and
mathematical formulas were the preferred route to “pure
understanding.”
Their paper derided
search engines that had become “commercial” and “advertising
oriented,” and offered an example of how “the advertising business
model” did not correspond “to providing quality search to users.”
Suppose, they wrote, a user did a search for cellular phones and the top result was a report on
how the use of cell phones was a dangerous distraction while
driving. Although this search result might be judged highly
important by their PageRank algorithm, it would be likely to
provoke protests from cell phone advertisers. Thus, they concluded,
“we expect that advertising funded search engines will be
inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs
of the consumers.”
The search system
they proposed—shaped around teams of engineers who shared
information, beta tested everything, and treated users, not
advertisers, as kings—was in turn shaped by the Stanford and Web
culture of the time. “They were,” observed Harvard Law professor
Lawrence Lessig, an author and intellectual guru to a generation of
Webheads, “part of an engineering tribe that defined itself as the
anti-Microsoft. What it meant to be on the other side was to
develop the exact opposite intuitions. Microsoft’s approach was:
‘You’re going to live by my rules.’ The opposite is: ‘No, I’m going
to build it and you’re free to use it however you want. I’m just
going to empower you to do what you want.’ It’s the Unix
philosophy: Give me a little pile of code and you can plug it into
anything you want. That was Stanford in the nineties.” It was the
Netscape philosophy too, for the same January 1998 month Page and
Brin presented their paper, the company that grew out of the
browser invented by Marc Andreessen announced that it was revealing
the source code to its browser; the new open-source browser would
later be named Mozilla.
The presentation was
a hit among the “tribe,” the professors and graduate students in
the audience. Page and Brin had solved a problem for Internet
users, said Motwani, who thought: “This is going to change the way
the Internet is used!” The word of mouth was electric. Motwani was
certain Internet companies would jockey to purchase the technology,
and soon after, Brin said, the two partners began speaking to
various Silicon Valley companies. Yet all passed on possibly
acquiring Google. Even new media companies, it appears, were slow
to peer over the horizon.
IN 1998, the year
Google was incorporated, utopianism radiated from Silicon Valley
and across the Web. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of
MIT’s Media Lab, published a book, Being
Digital, proclaiming that the Web would usher in a new
generation “free of many of the old prejudices.... Digital
technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world
harmony.” The Internet promised freedom from subscriptions and
rental charges, and from the crass and misleading advertising
dominating television. Digital companies giddily extolled their
“traffic” and “page views” and “market valuations,” ignoring their
sparse revenues and nonex istent profits. “New media” executives
marched to conferences attended by “old media” and gleefully
insulted them: “You guys don’t get it!” they’d say. “Open up. Share
your content. Dump your expensive printing presses. Use the
Internet as a promotional platform and your business will grow.”
But how to make money? No one knew.
Greed was also in the
air, provoked by dreams of untold riches. Business students flocked
to Silicon Valley. Optimism was the drug of choice. Page and Brin
opened Google’s first office in the living room of the two-bedroom
graduate housing unit in Escondido Village that Sergey shared with
a roommate. The Google computers and server were stored in the
living room of Larry’s graduate residence. Their machines placed a
serious strain on the limited electrical supply, and they learned
to break into the basement of Larry’s building to reset the circuit
breaker. “Fortunately, I had taken up lock picking so I could get
us into there,” recalled Brin. He had read a book written for the
very purpose: The MIT Guide to Lock
Picking.
Page and Brin had
definite ideas and were not easily swayed. They “thought it was
sleazy,” Motwani said, to allow Web sites to pay to appear near the
top of searches, as other search engines permitted. They were
determined to build a computer system that would never lack
capacity, as the one at Stanford sometimes did. To build user trust
they wanted a simple, functional home page without advertising or
pictures; they wanted to serve users by getting them off the Google
site as quickly as possible and on to their destination. Page and
Brin wouldn’t spend a penny to market Google. Anyway, they didn’t
have a penny; they had just about maxed out their three credit
cards. They believed in word-of-mouth advertising: they had the
best search engine, and they were sure word would
spread.
Their first employee,
Craig Silverstein, joined them in Sergey’s living room in 1998.
Silverstein, who today is the company’s director of technology, had
the foresight, he laughs, to “negotiate the lowest salary. Instead
I said, ‘I’ll take stock.’” It was phantom stock, and what the
founders needed was real capital. That winter, a Stanford computer
science professor, Jeffrey Ullman, introduced them to Ram Shriram,
a well-connected angel investor in the Valley. After making his
fortune at Netscape Communications, Shriram had recently launched
Junglee.com, an
online product search site. Larry and Sergey instinctively liked
and felt comfortable with the Indian-born Shriram, an affable,
unpompous man who asks pointed questions with the finesse of a
politician. They wanted to demonstrate their search engine and
Shriram suggested “a blind test” in which he picked a keyword and
searched it on Google and three other search engines. Shriram was
impressed with the speed and relevance of the results. But he told
them, “I’m not sure there is room for another search engine.” He
offered to introduce them to InfoSeek, Yahoo, and Excite, and
suggested they sell the technology. Larry and Sergey were still
ambivalent; they wanted to build a great search engine themselves.
But months later, in May, Shriram remembers, they called again and
said they had completed the meetings he recommended. He assumed
they had been rejected, but reluctantly agreed to
meet.
Larry and Sergey
drove to Junglee’s offices in Sunnyvale and described each of their
visits, the most interesting of which was with the founders of
Yahoo, Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yahoo was a thriving company that
attracted visitors with a broad menu of content encompassing
finance, news, and other services. Yang and Filo, they reported,
were impressed with their search engine. Very impressed, actually;
their concern was that it was too good. Yahoo was a public company,
and the more relevant the results of a search were, the fewer page
views users would experience before leaving Yahoo. Instead of ten
pages, they might see just a couple, and that would deflate the
number of page views Yahoo sold advertisers.
“That was for me the
aha moment,” said Shriram. “For the first time, I saw this as
something disruptive.” Companies like Yahoo and Excite were more
interested in being portals than in improving search, leaving an
opening for Larry and Sergey. They were still piggybacking on the
Stanford system, and they told Shriram that their search engine
consumed so much computer capacity that the university wanted them
to stop. They needed money.
Shriram offered to
make an initial investment and help them incorporate. He also
helped them work out a licensing agreement with Stanford so the
university would benefit if their two graduate students were
successful. On September 7, 1998, the day Google officially
incorporated, he wrote out a check for just over $250,000, one of
four of this size the founders received. The first was signed by
Sun Microsystems cofounder and then Cisco executive Andy
Bechtolsheim, who wrote his in August. He had been introduced to
Page and Brin by Stanford computer science professor David
Cheriton, who became the third initial investor. At the time,
Shriram was in the process of selling Junglee to Amazon.com, and in August
would start spending most of the week in Seattle as vice president,
business development, at Amazon. This link produced the secret
fourth investor, Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos. One day Bezos asked
Shriram what was interesting in the Valley. When he touted Google,
Bezos asked Shriram to arrange a meeting with Larry and Sergey. “I
just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos recalled; he wrote
his check in November. His enthusiasm was ignited less by the idea,
and “certainly not by the business plan. There was no business
plan. They had a vision. It was a customer-focused point of view.”
In September, Shriram was asked to join Page and Brin as one of
three Google directors, a seat he continues to hold on a board that
now consists of ten members.
For $1,700 a month,
the just-formed company sublet new office space: the two-car Menlo
Park garage and two downstairs spare rooms of an 1,800-square-foot
house in Menlo Park. The owners were friends: Susan Wojcicki, an
engineer at Intel, and her husband Dennis Troper, a product manager
at a tech company. The newly constituted Google had found its way
to them because Sergey had dated Susan’s roommate at Stanford
Business School. The house was not located in the upscale sections
of Menlo Park, near the Sand Hill Road offices made famous by the
venture capitalists whose offices are there, or in nearby Atherton,
where many of these venture capitalists live and in 2008 an acre of
land could sell for $3 million. Rather, it was on a dreary flag lot
at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue.
A concrete driveway
led up to the garage, where a whiteboard had been attached with the
legend, “Google Worldwide Headquarters.” Inside were three tables,
three chairs, a dirty turquoise shag carpet, a tiny refrigerator,
an old washer and dryer, and a Ping-Pong table that was kept folded
because there wasn’t space to leave it open. They kept the garage
door open for ventilation, and used a bathroom on the first floor
of the house. Their desks were old pine doors that straddled
sawhorses. On Monday mornings, Shriram met with Page and Brin in
the cramped bedroom they used as an office, before flying to Amazon
for the week. Days, nights, and weekends, Page and Brin and
Silverstein lived and worked there, often leaving well after
midnight in Silverstein’s ancient Porsche. “He’d start it and it
would backfire five times—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat,” Brin said. “It sounded like a
machine gun going off. We started pushing his car out onto the
street before we’d start it.”
Although it was still
in beta testing in the early fall of 1998, Google was getting ten
thousand search queries daily. “I was really getting excited about
Google,” said Shriram. The founders were getting excited too.
“Larry said, ‘We’ll be at the doorstep of information,’” Susan
Wojcicki recalled. Brin told her the company “was going to be worth
billions of dollars.” That was also what they told visitors from
search and portal companies who came to Wojcicki’s living room to
discuss the possibility of acquiring Google. Even though the
founders had no interest in selling, Wojcicki recalls that they’d
propose an outrageous price, knowing it would deflect suitors. They
also used the house for their first press interview, with a
correspondent from the German magazine Stern, in which they displayed a combination of
grandiosity and zeal. Search really “does have a potential to
really change things forever,” Brin said. It can “play a really
important role in people’s lives, determining what information they
get to look at,” said Page, adding, “and that’s an important thing
to do for the world.” Although Google had scant income, Page and
Brin believed that if they built Google, people would
come.