Every great company has an origin myth, and Google's has an unusually good one: a search engine named after a massage, a company named after a spelling mistake, and a $100,000 check made out to a business that did not legally exist. None of it was inevitable. In the summer of 1998, two Stanford graduate students had a brilliant algorithm, a growing pile of borrowed computers, and no real intention of becoming founders. Then someone wrote them a check they couldn't cash — and everything changed.
BackRub: the name nobody would have kept
Before it was Google, it was BackRub. When Larry Page began his 1996 research project at Stanford, the whole idea rested on backlinks — the notion that you could measure a web page's importance by counting and weighing the pages that linked to it. Page thought the name was clever. It captured the mechanism exactly: the web rubbing its own back, every link a small endorsement of another page.
BackRub ran on a patchwork of machines scattered around the Stanford campus, crawling the young web from a single starting point — Page's own home page. Sergey Brin soon joined, bringing the mathematical firepower to turn that tangle of links into the ranking system they called PageRank. The project worked almost too well. It devoured bandwidth, occasionally knocked Stanford's network offline, and steadily convinced its two creators that they had built something the existing search engines couldn't match. What it didn't have was a name anyone would want to type into a browser forever.
How a spelling mistake became a brand
The rename came out of a 1997 brainstorming session in a Stanford graduate lab. The founders wanted a word that captured the sheer scale of information they hoped to organize. A fellow student, Sean Anderson, suggested googolplex; Page countered with the shorter googol — the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was a perfect metaphor for a search engine meant to wrangle an unimaginably large web.
Then came the accident that stuck. Checking whether the domain was available, Anderson typed the word the way it sounded rather than the way it was spelled: google.com. It was free. Page liked the look of it, and on September 15, 1997, google.com was registered. One of the most valuable brand names in history began life as a misspelled math term — and to this day, "google" is the everyday word while "googol" is the trivia answer.
The check written before the company existed
By mid-1998, Page and Brin faced the classic Stanford dilemma: keep going as academics, or turn the project into a company. They were reluctant. They tried to license their technology to the existing search players and got little interest — nobody yet believed that better search was worth much money. So a mutual acquaintance arranged a meeting with Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and one of Silicon Valley's most respected hardware minds.
They met early one morning in August 1998 on the porch of a Stanford faculty member's home in Palo Alto. Bechtolsheim watched a quick demo, grasped immediately what PageRank could do, and — short on time — cut the conversation short. Rather than talk terms, he pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check for $100,000, made out to "Google Inc."
There was just one problem: Google Inc. didn't exist yet. There was no company, no bank account, nothing to deposit the check against. As the story goes, the check sat in a desk drawer for weeks while the founders scrambled to make the paperwork real. That single signature turned a research project into a startup almost against its creators' will. To cash it, they had to incorporate — and on September 4, 1998, Google Inc. was formally founded. Bechtolsheim's bet would eventually be worth billions.
A garage in Menlo Park
With money in the bank and a legal entity to hold it, the fledgling company needed a home — and it found one in the most Silicon Valley way possible. In September 1998, Page and Brin rented the garage of a house at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park for around $1,700 a month. The landlord was Susan Wojcicki, then a recent business-school graduate who would go on to become one of Google's most important executives and, later, the CEO of YouTube.
The garage came with a few perks the founders appreciated: a washer, a dryer, and a hot tub, plus enough room to pile in desks, servers, and the occasional ping-pong table. It was cramped, chaotic, and unmistakably a beginning. The check had forced them into being a company; now they had an address, a name spelled slightly wrong, and a hundred thousand dollars of someone else's faith to spend.
Next up in Part 4 — The Founding: the paperwork becomes real, the first employees walk into that garage, and a two-person research project starts learning how to be a company.
Comments
Post a Comment