Google turns 20!
How the company went from a humble search engine to a tech giant with tentacles in most of our lives
HE COULD’VE had it for the basement bargain price of just under R5 million. But in what’s been called one of the worst business decisions ever, George Bell passed on the chance to buy Google in 1999.
Of course at the time the CEO of the search engine Excite couldn’t have imagined that 20 years down the line the business would transform into a company worth more than R11 trillion.
There’s also the small matter of the brains behind the business being part of the package – Google might never have reached such lofty heights if the two geeks who developed the search engine had walked away to focus on their studies at Stanford University.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin (both 45) must be thanking their lucky stars that Bell sent them packing because they now head a company that’s one of the world’s top five.
The holding company may be called Alphabet these days but Google remains the crown jewel of the technology behemoth and is what comes to mind when people think about the founders of the business.
Incredibly, Google was started just 20 years ago when the pair decided to organise the world wide web.
WHEN LARRY MET SERGEY
“I thought he was pretty obnoxious,” Larry said years later of meeting Sergey on Stanford’s campus as a student.
Larry was a tour guide of sorts, showing the university to prospective students, and Sergey was in his group. “He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did too.”
But the Russian-born maths prodigy felt pretty much the same way about Larry, who was born in Michigan.
“We both found the other obnoxious,”
GOOGLE IS BORN
he once said. “But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going on.”
Their partnership will go down as one of the most successful in history. They teamed up to catalogue what was essentially the Wild West of the world wide web. Larry and Sergey launched Google in September 1998. They’d managed to raise $1 million (then R6 million) from family, friends and other investors, and used it to birth Google Inc. They were able to move their passion project from their student digs into its first office – a double garage they rented from Susan Wojcicki (now 50), who later became CEO of YouTube. Google soon eclipsed nowdefunct search engines such as AltaVista and Netscape Navigator. Then came the Excite misadventure – after which Sergey and Larry decided to knuckle down and focus on Google Inc. Sergey, who was torn between focusing on Google and completing his studies, remembers speaking with his PhD adviser, who told him, “Look, if this Google thing pans out, then great. If not, you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis.”
INTO THE FUTURE
The search engine would be just the beginning. To date Google’s founders have added more than 180 companies to it, including cellphone giant Motorola and video website YouTube.
The Google arm of the business includes the search engine, Google Maps services and their mobile operating system, Android. This is where most of their revenue is generated.
Alphabet’s other subsidiary companies are a little more adventurous. For example, X Development (formerly Google X) is involved in groundbreaking projects, from developing artificial intelligence and drone delivery services to glucose- reading contact lenses and driverless cars.
Another division, Calico, is even more ambitious. The research and development biotech company is researching extending human lifespans – something Sergey is particularly fascinated by.
EVERYONE’S DREAM JOB
Haircuts, an on-site gym, dry cleaners, massage parlours – Googleplex, the company’s sprawling headquarters in Mountain View, California, has it all. “Our employees, who’ve named themselves Googlers, are everything,” Larry and Sergey say. “We provide many unusual benefits for them, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We’re careful to consider the long-term advantages to the company of these benefits.”
SOURCES: GOOGLE.COM, GOOGLEBLOG.BLOGSPOT.COM, CNN, ABC.XYZ, HISTORY.COM, FORBES.COM, REUTERS, YOUTUBE, AP