Google, the leading search engine worldwide, was founded in 1998 by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergei Brin. Page and Brin had been working together on a search engine they called "BackRub" since early 1996, but with the encouragement of Yahoo! co-founder David Filo, they decided to start a company in 1998 and went looking for investors to back them. Google, Inc. was established on September 7, 1998. The founders hired Craig Silverstein - who was later to become Director of Technology - as their first employee, and started the business in a friend's garage.
In August 1998, thanks to David Cheriton, a Stanford professor, Page and Brin meet Andy Bechtolsheim, founder of Sun Microsystem and working at Cisco.
After an hour, he makes a $100,000 check to “Google Inc.” without knowing the company does not exist yet. Andy was one of the few to see true potential of what these boys had created. During their presentation to him, Andy said he had to duck out for another meeting and offered to write them a check. The check was for $100,000 and that indeed had got things moving for them.
In October 1998, Page and Brin convinced a friend to rent a Garage and spare room for $1700/month. They quickly added 8 phone lines, a cable modem and a DSL line. After two months, they were 8 people and they moved again in February 1999. From a first office in a garage good for small team, they moved to 165 University Ave. in Palo Alto after 5 months This is the home of many other startups including Logitech and Paypal.
In September the boys moved into the their workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park, CA. They then went on to file for incorporation in California on September 4 1998. Shortly after completing this important task, the boys went an opened a bank account in the name of Google Inc., their newly established company, and deposited the $100,000 dollar check Andy Bechtolsheim had given them. Shortly after they have established there new business they began hiring employees. There first one was Craig Silverstein, a fellow grad student from Stanford as well.
Early in 1999 they struck a deal with Sequoia Capitaland Kleiner Perkins for $25 million. In November 1999 Charlie Ayers joined Google as the company’s first chef. In April of 2000. Google announced the MentalPlex program, which envisages the software’s ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want. In June of 2000, Google partnered with Yahoo! to become their default search provider. Also in June they announced the first billion URL index, making Google become the world’s largest search engine. In September of 2000 they started offering searches in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean , bringing their total number of supported languages to 15. In December 2000 Google toolbar was released.
It is well known that it extremely difficult to keep on being innovative. Google has taken creative approaches: employees work in small teams (3ideally) and are free to use 20% of their working time personal projects that may become future Google Products. Google News, Froogle, Gmail have roots in this 20% time as well as Orkut.
And they do not seem to lose their humor.
"Feel free to write me or leave comments for me"
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