World Changers

And for years they both have sported ear-to-ear grins thanks to starring in the ultimate Revenge of the Nerds story—not only did they both “get the girls,” they practically own the world. The world of information, that is, which had been their goal from the start.

When the two initially met at Stanford University in March 1995, Page, then twenty-two, was visiting Stanford to decide whether to attend. Brin, already a gifted grad student and twenty-one, was assigned to show him around campus. Legend had it that they disagreed about almost everything during their first meeting. Regardless, soon after Page enrolled in the PhD program, the pair began collaborating on a search engine called BackRub.

Page wanted to download the entire contents of the Web onto a computer as part of his research for his dissertation. He confidently told his professor at the time that it would take him only a week. This gross miscalculation (by the end of the year he had only a small portion downloaded) spurred him on to create what would become one of the most innovative and disruptive companies in the world—Google. At the same time, Sergey Brin was making his name by creating a software program for a formatting markup language.

A self-proclaimed “university brat,” Page was raised on college campuses. His father, Carl, was a Michigan State computer science professor. Both his parents shared an early fascination with technology and computers, with his father moving on to obtain three degrees from the University of Michigan in the subject. So it was no accident that the son came of age in a world where computers were ever present. As he recalls, “We had computers laying all over the place and I was the first kid in my class to turn in a paper that had been typed on a word processor.”

Literally halfway around the world, meantime, Sergey Brin was beginning his own adventures in computing. Born in Moscow to Jewish parents, Sergey’s father, Michael, had long dreamed of becoming an astronomer, but had been denied entry to the best universities due to anti-Semitism. Instead, he earned his degree in mathematics at Moscow State University. They lived in a three-room, 350-square-foot apartment shared with his paternal grandmother until the family emigrated to the United States when Brin was six years old. When they applied for their exit visas, both parents lost their jobs.

In 1979, the family settled in Maryland, where Michael Brin eventually became a professor in the mathematics department of the University of Maryland. Like Page’s father, Brin’s father was able to actively raise his son, encouraging his love of mathematics. Brin was a strong student and graduated with honors from the University of Maryland. As his interest in computer science grew, he set his sights on moving west to California, where the majority of computer development was taking place.

After the two met at Stanford, they became fast friends. Page’s project “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” quickly gained the attention of the computer department. Brin joined his friend’s effort and by the fall of 1997 they called the initial search product BackRub. The name obviously wouldn’t stick. After several days of brainstorming different ideas they came up with Google, after the numerical term googol, referring to 1 with one hundred zeros after it. With its new name, Google was made internally accessible to those at Stanford University and history was in the making. The following year they moved the budding company to a friend’s garage, following in the footsteps of two other well-known Stanford entrepreneurs, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.

Page and Brin were classic bootstrappers. Maxing out three credit cards and gathering some spare cash from friends and faculty, they bought three servers off the back of a truck. They were then able to capture the attention of a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, who wrote them a check for $100,000. There were at least five prominent search engines available at the time. But what differentiated Google and allowed it to quickly return more accurate searches was its approach: Page and Brin developed algorithms to process the link structure of the Web based on the theory that the more others linked to a piece of information the more important it ultimately was.

From 1998 to 2001, Page served as chief executive until Eric Schmidt, the former chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems and a former CEO of Novell, was recruited to the job. Schmidt helped to bring Google public in 2004 and helped to lead its massive growth. In his last year as CEO, Google revenues exceeded $29 billion and its net profits were s8.5 billion. With more than 28,000 employees, Google became one of the biggest entrepreneurial success stories ever. Page took back the CEO’s job in early 2011, while Brin retained his focus on product development.

Page: We didn’t start out to do a search engine at all. In late 1995, I started collecting the links on the Web, because my adviser and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the Web—which pages link to which pages. So it is a huge graph. I figured I could get a dissertation and do something fun and perhaps practical at the same time, which is really what motivates me.

I started off by reversing the links, and then I wanted to find basically, say, who links to the Stanford home page, and there’s ten thousand people who link to Stanford. Then the question is, which ones do you show? So you can only show ten, and we ended up with this way of ranking links, based on the links. Then we were like, “Wow, this is really good. It ranks things in the order you would expect to see them.” Stanford would be first. You can take universities and just rank them, and they come out in the order you’d expect. So we thought, “This is really interesting. This thing really works. We should use it for search.” So I started building a search engine. Sergey also came on very early, probably in late ’95 or early’96, and was really interested in the data mining part. Basically, we thought, “Oh, we should be able to make a better search engine this way.”

Page: I think the age is a real issue. It’s certainly a handicap in the sense of being able to manage people and to hire people and all these kinds of things, maybe more so than it should be. Certainly, I think, the things that I’m missing are more things that you acquire with time. If you manage people for twenty years, or something like that, you pick up things. So I certainly lack experience there, and that’s an issue. But I sort of make up for that, I think, in terms of understanding where things are going to go, having a vision about the future, and really understanding the industry I am in, and what the company does, and also sort of the unique position of starting a company and working on it for three years before starting the company. Then working on it pretty hard, whatever, twenty-four hours a day. So I understand a lot of the aspects pretty well. I guess that compensates a little bit for lack of skills in other areas.

Page: You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning? Well, I had one of those dreams when I was twenty-three. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole Web, and just keep the links and ... I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work.

Soon after, I told my adviser, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the Web—he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But much later we happened upon a better way of ranking Web pages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

Page: Don’t settle. It’s very, very important if you are starting a company to have the right people involved. I can’t stress that enough. I have been enormously happy with people we have involved at Google with my cofounder and with Eric. We took a long time to find these people. It took over a year to hire Eric. Having great people involved who you really like and who are compatible with you is tremendously important. You are never going to question the equity you gave up or any of the other things if you have that.

The other thing I think we really benefited from was being real experts. We worked on Google together for many years at Stanford before we started the company. That was a pretty nice position to be in. We understood all aspects of search. We talked to all the search companies. We really knew a lot about what was going on. You can do that pretty cheaply. It’s just your labor. You can invest a year or two and you can learn something really well before you start having hundreds of people working on the problem.

I went to a leadership seminar once in Michigan, where I came from, and they have a great slogan, which was “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.” What this means is that you should set stretch goals that you are not sure you can achieve but are sort of reasonable. You don’t want completely outlandish goals. One thing I didn’t realize when I was starting Google is that it’s often easier to have aggressive goals. A lot of times people pick very specific things they want to do because they think it’s easier to attain. If you are being more specific, you also get less resources. So the question isn’t how much resources you can get. It’s can you make a case for what you’re doing and does it make sense and do you have a real advantage?

On this theme, it’s okay to solve a hard problem. That’s why you get paid if you’re a company. It’s for doing something that other people can’t do easily. A lot of times it’s important to do the whole problem. So don’t be afraid of the hard problems. That’s where you get the big leverage.

Finally, don’t pay any attention to the VC bandwagon. A lot of companies still get started because some space is hot. And honestly, I don’t think that’s a very good reason to start a company. In fact, we see hundreds or thousands of people who come to us who want us to commercialize something or who want us to collaborate with their business. We actually look at these, and I look at quite a few of them. And my guess is there may be one a year we are interested in. The trick is to have the one that somebody is going to be interested in because it’s a good idea and not be one of the thousands that come through all the time. If you’re the one good deal or you have a good idea and you really understand the area you’re in, the funding environment doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hot area. I guarantee you’ll be able to get people to help you out.

Brin: The way I like to think about it is not to maintain our culture but to improve it and increase it. Scale presents challenges but also opportunities. For example, if you look at the infrastructure we have in computational facilities. Now when we want to run an experiment we can get it done in a few hours’ time. This really opens new possibilities. At the same time, you have to make sure that scale doesn’t slow you down in terms of doing innovative things. The way we have historically come at it is we try to divide our company into chunks. It’s the 70-20-10 rule. About 70 percent try to work on the core efforts of the company, 20 percent goes to adjacent areas and expansion, and for the 10 percent anything goes. As we have expanded our breadth of offerings, it’s actually harder and harder to find the 10 percent out there. But I think that’s important to let people be really creative and think outside the box. The real challenge in scale has been offering a coherent set of services to our end users, because there is a limit to my ability and to everyone’s ability to choose among fifty different things. So we’ve been trying to change the paradigm from products to features to enhance the capability of all our existing offerings across the board rather than creating a new silo out there.

Brin: We have relatively few disagreements, actually. And most of the time you usually don’t care so much or all three of us don’t care so much. Honestly, we try to go for two out of three. It’s good to have an odd number. When people feel really strongly about something, you have to take the time to talk it through. The most controversial thing I recently did was to reduce the amount of snacks we have available. It took a long time to persuade Larry and Eric, but even after having accomplished that, then the rest of the staff was resistant. No matter what we said, food kept arriving in vast quantities in the snack bins. After a couple of years I prevailed and they reduced the amount of food.

Page: I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. They all travel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue. The best people want to work the big challenges. That is what happened with Google. Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. How can that not get you excited? But we almost didn’t start Google, because my cofounder Sergey and I were too worried about dropping out of our PhD program. You are probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm! That is about how we felt after we maxed out three credit cards buying hard disks off the back of a truck. That was the first hardware for Google. What is the one-sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!

Page: I think it definitely helps to be really focused on what you are doing. You can only work so many hours, and I try to have some balance in my life and so on. I think a lot of people go through this in school. They work really hard. You can do that for part of your life, but you can’t do that indefinitely. At some point, you want to have a family. You want to have more time to do other things. I would say that it is an advantage being young. You don’t have as many other responsibilities.

Brin: In terms of being remembered, I think I want to make the world a better place. That’s a pretty generic answer, but I mean it in several ways. One is through Google, the company, in terms of giving people access to information. I’m sure I will do other endeavors in terms of technologies and businesses. The second is just through philanthropy. I don’t have a significant amount of wealth beyond that on paper right now, but I hope that I have the opportunity to direct resources to the right places. I think that is the most important thing to me. I don’t think my quality of life is really going to improve that much with more money.

Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the home page, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our home page interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the Web you want it right away—and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our home page as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern Web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on Web sites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every Web page using more than two hundred signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the Web. As the Web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.

The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking e-mail and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers, and developers.

Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the Web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:

We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find—so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.

We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher click-through rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.

Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results, and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity, and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.

Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far-flung corners of the globe.

We built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture—and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees—energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play, and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting, or at the gym, they are traded, tested, and put into practice with dizzying speed—and they may be the launchpad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the Web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any e-mail service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious—but that’s because now we have new standards for e-mail storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.