Interesting article on Google & founders..
seattletimes.nwsource.com
Google looks for new ideas as much as profits
By Mary Anne Ostrom and Matt Marshall
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Around the globe, Google has become a synonym for
searching the Internet, as in let's "Google" that.
In Silicon Valley, the Mountain View, Calif., company is
the hottest private company around, with a good shot
at becoming a business legend like Netscape
Communications, Apple Computer or eBay.
Founded by two Stanford graduate students in 1998,
Google reinvented online searching. Today, the
company says it handles 200 million searches a day
and, according to some estimates, about 75 percent of
all search-engine-generated traffic to Web sites.
Google makes it possible to search instantly for
virtually anything on the Web. It is an encyclopedia,
phone book, shopping catalog, news archive and
gossip sheet rolled into one.
"Google has made knowledge a habit," said Barbara
Quint, a librarian and editor of Search Magazine.
It also is a rare reminder there is financial promise in
the Internet.
Google, with 800 employees and growing fast, won't
disclose finances. But industry speculation has Google
ringing up $400 million to $700 million in sales this
year, mostly from using technology to target relevant
ads to Web users. The company says it has been
making money since December 2000.
Yet profits alone don't seem to be enough for the
ambitious young founders. Their ethos of thinking big
evokes other celebrated Silicon Valley companies that
tried to change the world through technology.
The mindset has trickled down through Google's
geek-filled staff and is enforced by an official policy
that company engineers devote a quarter of their time
to thinking up great, new ideas — even if financial
promise is questionable.
In many ways, co-founders Larry Page, 30, and Sergey Brin, 29, have the quintessential valley story:
using Stanford as a lab for their brainchild, launching in a garage and attracting high-tech's premier
venture capitalists.
After Silicon Valley's most precipitous slump in decades, they represent a new dot-com generation
focused on perfecting their product and turning a profit before going public, not after.
While many investors and employees would love to see a Google initial public offering (IPO), the founders
dampen those expectations. Going public would invite scrutiny of the company's bottom line, which could
lead to short-term thinking and cautious strategy, they warn.
Instead, Google is tackling one of the biggest challenges of modern life: helping people find information
that's important to them.
"It's a really important, big problem for the world," said Brin.
As for holding off on an IPO, he added: "Right now, I think we're really enjoying the time when we can
have a lot of freedom and be as impactful as we possibly can."
Their way
Brin and Page so far have had their way, demanding only the sharpest technology, hiring only the
smartest of employees (Google once required SAT scores of job candidates), and plowing ahead with
ideas — sometimes quirky — that will take Google deeper into the lives of Internet users.
Without spending a dime on a branding campaign, Google has embedded itself in popular culture.
On a night game-show host Regis Philbin asked the million-dollar question on "Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire," Google registered tens of thousands of queries from users seeking the answer.
Philbin wanted to know the maiden name of Carol Brady of TV's sitcom "The Brady Brunch." The answer,
Tyler, is derived from near-instantaneous searches of a giant network of Google servers that index more
than 3 billion Web pages. (Today, that search returns 3,440 Web links in 0.19 seconds.)
These days, Google is expanding its search territory to compete with bigger and broader Internet players
like MSN and Yahoo!
There's Google News, thought up on an employee's whim, which offers up-to-the-minute news stories
culled from 4,500 sources. There's the indexing of photos and catalogs. There's Froogle.com, a product
search site.
Google's biggest money-maker is advertising. It gets paid to place small text ads above and next to
non-commercial search results on its own site and the sites of partners such as America Online and
Amazon.com. Google says its 100,000 advertisers make it the world's largest Web-ad network.
Sons of professors
Google started with two Stanford computer-science
students, both sons of math professors. Brin, born in
Moscow, and Page, from Michigan, sought to prove
that a mathematical analysis of the links among Web
sites could produce better search results than simply
counting keywords. They defined relevancy by the
number and quality of links to a Web site.
They called it Page Rank, after Larry Page. The
process could be completely automated, with no human
editors.
The two founders and first employees met around a
pingpong table in a Menlo Park, Calif., garage. During a
1998 meeting with early investors, Sun Microsystems
co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim tired of listening to Brin
and Page worry about spending money. He raced back
to his Porsche and insisted on writing them a $100,000
check. He made it out to Google.
No such entity existed, forcing Brin and Page to set up
the company in order to cash the check. Google is a
play on "googol" — the mathematical term for a 1
followed by 100 zeros — a reference to organizing the
seemingly infinite Web.
By June 1999, Brin and Page had attracted more than $25 million from two legendary venture capitalists,
John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital.
The founders resisted when pushed by those backers to hire a chief executive, taking a year to agree on
a choice. Eric Schmidt, the former Novell CEO and onetime Sun Microsystems executive, joined Google in
August 2001.
Running a company
Although Google's founders have given up a sizable stake in the company to venture capitalists, the
eccentric pair are the company's cultural soul and, along with Schmidt, run Google.
Page is the more cerebral of the two, the big thinker who also worries about whether his engineers will like
their new digs. Brin, insiders say, has more business instinct, is the negotiator and has a sharp sense of
humor that usually involves poking fun at his co-founder.
"Of the two of us, Larry will always take the extreme position," Brin said.
When the subject of free employee lunches came up, Page proposed a plan to feed the world. They
compromised on free staff lunches and dinners. Recent menus included endive and pear salad with
pomegranate-molasses dressing and pork loin in mustard veal reduction sauce, prepared by an
award-winning former chef to the Grateful Dead.
Google headquarters, known as the Googleplex, is a throwback to the late 1990s. In the lobby, decorated
with lava lamps and giant plastic balls, an engineer takes a break to play a baby grand. A pool table is
nearby, and Brin and Page zip around on new Segway scooters.
The freewheeling culture can lead to pie-in-the-sky ideas: Over a January dinner at venture capitalist
Steve Jurvetson's home, Page and Brin became excited about the idea of rearranging atoms into
super-tiny computers. They exclaimed they could create a nanotech lab at Google. (The company says
there are now no such plans.)
"It is like Netscape in the early years — kids sleeping on the cots, the dogs are in there, they've stacked
up the beer cans," said Doerr.
Corporate discipline
But Google has a discipline, albeit unconventional. Engineers — including more than 60 with doctorates —
work in committees of three to develop new projects. The trio with the most ambitious but plausible idea
gets the most backing.
As Page explained: "You'll get more resources within the company, you get people more excited, you get
people outside writing about it."
While they dream, Brin and Page also watch the details: They use software to tally, to the second, how
much money the company is raking in.
They said the free, healthful meals only came about after calculating reduced health-care costs and the
time saved from driving off-site to eat. There's even a Web cam trained on the lunch line, so that
employees can avoid a long wait.
While most of the tech world buzzes about an IPO, Google's founders hold firm to their technological
ambitions — building, in Page's words, "the ultimate search engine."
"It would understand exactly what you type and would give you the right things back," said Page. "We're
pretty good, but we're nowhere close to being perfect. We won't be for a long time."
Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company |
