By the summer of 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a problem that most graduate students would kill for: their side project was too good to stay a side project. BackRub had become Google, PageRank was quietly outperforming every commercial search engine on the market, and—as we saw in Part 3—a Sun co-founder named Andy Bechtolsheim had just handed them a $100,000 check after a ten-minute demo on a Palo Alto porch. There was only one catch. The check was made out to “Google Inc.,” and Google Inc. did not exist.
A check that forced a company into being
For roughly two weeks that check sat in a desk drawer while Page and Brin scrambled to do the one thing they had been avoiding: turn a research prototype into a real business. You cannot deposit money to a company that has not been incorporated, and so on September 4, 1998, Google was officially registered as a privately held company in California. Page was 25. Brin was 24. Both formally took leave from their Stanford PhD programs—a “temporary” pause that would turn out to be permanent.
Incorporation unlocked more than a bank account. With a legal entity in place, the founders could finally gather the informal promises floating around Silicon Valley into an actual seed round. Bechtolsheim’s $100,000 was joined by money from Stanford professor David Cheriton, from Sun co-founder–turned–angel Ram Shriram, and—famously—from a young Amazon founder named Jeff Bezos, who liked Page and Brin and wanted in. By the time the round closed, the two students had assembled close to $1 million in initial funding. Not bad for a company whose entire product still lived on borrowed hardware.
The garage on Santa Margarita Avenue
A company needs an office, and Google’s first one was not an office at all. In September 1998 the founders moved out of their Stanford dorm rooms and rented a garage—plus a few spare rooms—in a house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park. The rent was about $1,700 a month, which the fledgling company could suddenly afford, and the landlord was a Stanford friend named Susan Wojcicki. She was newly married, carrying a mortgage, and figured renting out the garage would help cover it. She had no way of knowing she was leasing space to the company that would define the next two decades of the internet—or that she would soon quit her own job to join it, eventually rising to run YouTube.
The garage was cramped, freezing when the door was open and stifling when it was closed, and stuffed with the cheap, cobbled-together servers Page loved to build from spare parts. A ping-pong table doubled as a desk. The refrigerator was stocked, the hours were brutal, and the whole operation ran on the conviction that search was a problem worth obsessing over. It was, in every cliche and also in truth, a garage startup.
Employee number one
The founders’ first hire was another Stanford PhD student, Craig Silverstein, who became Google’s first employee and would spend more than a decade there as a director of technology. In those early months the line between “founder,” “employee,” and “friend who showed up to help” was blurry. There was no HR department, no org chart, no polished mission statement—just a handful of people who believed the messy, link-tangled web could be organized, and who were willing to sleep near their servers to prove it.
What makes the founding remarkable in hindsight is how little of it was planned. Page and Brin had spent two years trying not to start a company—they had even tried to sell the technology and go back to their studies. Incorporation happened almost by accident, forced by a check they couldn’t cash. But once Google Inc. existed, the momentum was undeniable. Within a year the garage would be too small, and the company would decamp to a real office at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, then to Mountain View, growing faster than anyone inside it could quite believe.
They had a name, a company, a million dollars, and a garage full of humming machines. What they did not yet have was a way to make money—and a distinctly unusual idea about how a company should behave. Next time: the three words that became Google’s conscience—“Don’t be evil.”
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