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In the early 90s, Larry Page met Sergey Brin as a Ph.D. student at Stanford University. The two of them bonded over their similarity in questioning the traditional ways that information was organized on the internet. This led to them creating a search engine called Backrub in 1996. Backrub had a unique algorithm that ranked pages based on their backlinks and PageRank score. It wasn’t until the following year that the name changed to Google that we all know today.
The name Google comes from the mathematical term “googol,” which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. This name embodies Larry and Sergey’s mission which was to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. They did not have a business plan initially and began as an academic project.
In 1998, the tech-savvy duo set up an office in a garage. They raised their first investment of a hundred thousand dollars from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. In September 1998, they hired their first employee, Craig Silverstein. There were only three employees in the company when they moved to their first headquarters in Menlo Park. Here, they established the famous Google culture, which included an informal atmosphere, flexibility, and perks such as free food and recreation areas.
From there, the growth of Google was explosive. The company went public in 2004, with a market cap of over $23 billion, making Larry and Sergey both billionaires. They started branching out into other areas such as email (Gmail), mapping (Google Maps), and video (YouTube). Today, Google is one of the most recognized and successful companies in the world. Larry and Sergey are no longer running the day-to-day operations, having stepped aside in 2019, but their impact on the internet will be felt for generations to come.