When the Stars Aligned...

Given the way Google considers everything as a problem that engineering can fix, I assumed its founders are pure geeks. Which made it all the more surprising how they’ve managed to run the company so well, and retain control… aspects you associate with managers, not engineers.

Walter Isaacson’s Innovators answered those questions for me. When he was twelve, (Google founder) Larry Page read a biography of Nikola Tesla and was troubled by it: though he was one of the greatest of inventors, he was very poor at commercializing his inventions. Page describes his learning from that:

“If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody. You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.”

Which is why Page made sure he majored in both computer science and business. He also got to learn from his older brother (by 9 years) Carl’s experience of founding a social networking company that was eventually bought by Yahoo! for $413 million. Before college, Page therefore attended a leadership course where they encouraged a “healthy disregard for the impossible”.

Page also got lucky in that he, like the other co-founder, Sergey Brin, was rejected by MIT but accepted by Stanford. Lucky why? Isaacson explains:

“Most other elite universities emphasized scholarly research and avoided commercial endeavors… (whereas at Stanford) tech entrepreneurship was not merely tolerated but expected.”

At Stanford, for his dissertation topic, Page picked on an “audacious idea”:

“What if we download the whole Web, and just keep the links?”

That would be the core of the famous search algorithm, PageRank: how many sites linked to a site, weighted for importance, decided a site’s rank. Then came the key test:

“The billion-dollar question was whether PageRank would actually produce search results.”

In a dry-run against existing search engines, PageRank won hands-down:

“ “I remember asking them, “Why are you giving people garbage?” Page said. The answer he got was that the poor results were his fault, that he should refine his search query… (The opposite insight), the user is never wrong, led to this idea that we could produce a search engine that was better.”

Now came the university’s pressure that they “publish something”. Page and Brin, who now were clear that they wanted to found a company around search, were “reluctant to publish or give formal presentations on what they had done”. As a compromise, the duo “managed to explain the academic theories behind PageRank and Google without opening their kimono so wide that it revealed too many secrets to competitors”. As Isaacson said:

“This may have been a problem at universities where research is supposed to be pursued primarily for scholarly purposes, not commercial applications. But Stanford not only permitted students to work on commercial endeavors, it encouraged and facilitated it.”

A combo of the lessons from Tesla’s experience, extraordinary smarts, and being in the right university… all of that contributed to what became Google.