The story, which we believe is by now a “classic” in terms of success stories of companies in the internet era, begins in a small bedroom at the University of Stanford. All of a sudden you have 2 brilliant minds, those of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, that meet for the first time and disagree on everything. Is the difference in opinions a recipe for great partnerships? It might be.
Page was already working on a project, studying the linking of the pages on the World Wide Web. He and Brin came up with PageRank, their first software that used an algorithm, called BackRub (and thank God they changed it to Google!) to crawl the pages on a website and identify its backlink profile to get a sense of how important a page is. They used this in order to rank a page higher in the search engine. And believe it or not, this was back in 1996!
Up until their project, web browsers were ranking results based on the number of times a search keyword was used on a page. What Larry and Sergey did was introduce a little more logic to this idea and realize that if a page is linked to multiple pages, it must imply some level of relevancy. Following up on that idea they came up with a system of prioritizing the backlinks. If you got a backlink from a website that has many backlinks, that would count more than having one from an obscure one. It only makes sense, right?
If we lived in 1998 now, we could not even imagine the amplitude that BackRub was going to take.
Let’s imagine it’s 1998 and the genius Duo of Page and Brin is receiving its first sum of money from an outside investor, Andy Bechtolsheim. They used this money to incorporate under a new name and, in no time, they managed to get people to believe in their vision, that of Google, organizing the world’s information in a single place.
Fun fact, the name was born from a misspelled word, namely googol. The initial word was supposed to make a sending to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros. It’s a pretty suggestive name thinking of the amount of data a web browser, as the one the founders envisioned, would need to contain.
With the new money acquired, they moved to California, renting a garage for their first office. The place is known as Menlo Park. We are told that the atmosphere in the first office was not at all lacking positivity and colors. From the ping pong table to the blue carpet, the office dog, and the motto “Do no evil”, the vibe of the soon-to-be Unicorn was a good one.
Get ready, we launch in 3, 2, 1… search.
After the 1999s, when the company received around $25 million from investors, business started to get really crazy for Google. By this time the search engine was already processing around 500k searches per day. It was after Google associated with Yahoo!, which back then, in the year 2000, was the most searched website in the world, that the recipe for becoming a Unicorn was undisputed. In 2004 the company obtained $1.6 billion with its first IPO and the founders were, from then onwards, billionaires.
From their first product, the search engine, Google continued to add a lot of other internet services to their portfolio. From maps to docs, YouTube, and many others. They didn’t stop there as no one in their position, we believe, would have. They continued to increase their influence, products, and services offered in a wider realm. Under the 2015 newly formed umbrella called Alphabet.Inc, with Google just a subsidiary, the company was active in areas such as smartphones, operating systems, electric cars, and many more.
Even though Larry Page and Sergey Brin have relinquished their executive roles, they maintain majority ownership of the company and continue to be involved through their positions on the board of directors.
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