Did they just capitalize on a great idea or were they really geniuses? Google seems like a really fantastic idea but how much brains were needed to get it up and rolling? Was it similar to Apple?
Did they just capitalize on a great idea or were they really geniuses? Google seems like a really fantastic idea but how much brains were needed to get it up and rolling? Was it similar to Apple?
The two had healthy visions and the people they surrounded themselves with were very high aptitude people. This was a good time in California in the 90s.
Google was not the first search engine, but they got the algorithm right before anyone else did.
The true brilliant idea Page and Brin had was in using cheap computers. The world at the time was all into buying trucks full of SUN stuff, and similar, while these two had piles of crappy parts people were nearly giving away. The ads said "The network is the computer," and they took that to heart.
Fking smart.
Stanford Phd in Comp Sci is a Top 3 program (MIT and Berkeley being others).
You had to literally be near top of the class at an elite college + publish some papers as an UNDERGRAD and having glowing recommendation letters from your department geezers to get in.
These guys were smart.
That said, there were guys smarter than them. Larry and Sergey just got really lucky with their PHD thesis topic.
I wonder if you know Google didn't invent search.
The "idea" they had was a distributed search algorithm which had a cleaner interface than search engines of the day. It wasn't really that big of an idea. More of the right place at the right time.
Many of their other ideas (remember they had "Google Labs" and 20% personal research project time committed to new ideas) where they have tried to break away from search have been abysmal failures. Their are too many failures to count. Now they have resorted to buying up already successful companies like Nest.
They were smart enough to get into grad school at Stanford. So very smart. That puts them in company with a million other people. Their wealth puts them in company with a dozen other people.
They wanted to start a business, that is a big reason they chose Stanford.
Their first "startup" was faxing pizza orders to pizza resturaunts. It failed when they realized it was not useful.
Then they published a research paper that showed that backlinks can improve internet search results.
They decided to make a company out of it.
The company grew to the point where 80% of the world's population gives Google free business by choosing them to search the internet. This happens billions of times every day.
Google monetizes these searches by showing ads in the searches.
Google prints over $50 billion a year from this money printer called search ads.
In conclusion: they were smart guys that executed well in a space that they were insanely lucky to have fallen into.
They only other money printer of comparable size is Facebook, which was also executed well by a very smart guy, Mark Zuckerberg, in a space that he was insanely lucky to have fallen into.
What makes a company successful often does not indicate the founders of one company have higher IQ than founders of another company. Were those who manufactured VCR necessarily smarter than those who manufactured Betamax? Is Google that much better than Bing? Facebook versus My Space. Top mutual fund and top hedge fund managers get labeled genius. They talk jargon talk. There is a certain randomness to it all. Is Larry Kramer, Mad Money, more intelligent than the average man? Yes. Only slightly. His track record for recommendations are awful. Kramer just had enough horse sense to get out of commodity/futures trading after things went well. Hillary Rodham Clinton made app. $118,000 on a $10000 investment over 13 months trading mostly pork bellies on spot & future markets while she was an attorney at Rose Law Firm. If Clinton thought it were skill, she would still be trading pork bellies.
Of all the tech kazillionaires, Page and Brin are actually the closest to being the real deal in terms of technical genius. Bezos, Jobs, Ballmer and Gates are smart guys, but did not have that much to do with the technical successes at their companies. They were successful because they were ruthless businessmen who were willing to crush and destroy any company that got in their way. Page and Brin really did make a giant leap forward with search engine technology that laid the foundation for google. And Page was smart enough to understand that he had limitations as a manager and got Eric Schmidt to come in to run the company once big VC funding was pouring in.
Hillary made money trading futures because her uncle who worked at the trading pit gave her insider info, moran
This is a great thread. Please keep the wealth of information flowing.
Generally, I agree with you re. not too many product successes outside search. However, Google did play a big role in the development of Android.
People will say they weren’t geniuses but it’s really just haterade. If you don’t think those guys are way, way, way, way above average intellectually, you’re a douche. You can’t revolutionize the world you’re not a a genius. Think of how many MFs there were in tech in the year 2000 wanting to be the next Bill Gates. All of them looking for the next big thing. Only two of them found it.
If you think back to the Internet in the early days of widespread adoption in the 1990s, finding the extant websites (navigating the web) was very difficult. The key problem other than the slow speeds of transmission and downloading and the lack of a lot of great content was the lack of effective search engines. They were the first to solve that problem and they also adopted the method of generating revenue that still today provides most of their revenue, ads. Once they had corner the market for search engines, they became the portal to the web and so their ad business has been something of a monopoly--akin to Microsoft's IBM-compatible monopoly but potentially longer lasting and effective across all computer makes. Since then, they've had many, many flops, and like other computer giants many of their other successes have been dependent on buying up other companies, not doing much on their own. If a company has its own DNA, their DNA is the search engine/ads and they've not done well with much else other than the Android software. It may be that their risk-taking has advanced tech and competition in many areas but there doesn't seem much to show for it. And they are a monopoly and therefore need to be treated more like the old public monopolies--Bell Telephone--and regulated because of their market power across the entire economy.
FFF wrote:
Google was not the first search engine, but they got the algorithm right before anyone else did.
The true brilliant idea Page and Brin had was in using cheap computers. The world at the time was all into buying trucks full of SUN stuff, and similar, while these two had piles of crappy parts people were nearly giving away. The ads said "The network is the computer," and they took that to heart.
It wasn't just developing the algorithm but they figured out how to monetize the search function. That's what often separates really successful companies. It's turning the idea into a product that generates revenue at a high rate of return that's self-sustaining.
Smarter than Alta Vista!!
startup researcher wrote:
They were smart enough to get into grad school at Stanford. So very smart. That puts them in company with a million other people. Their wealth puts them in company with a dozen other people.
They wanted to start a business, that is a big reason they chose Stanford.
Their first "startup" was faxing pizza orders to pizza resturaunts. It failed when they realized it was not useful.
Then they published a research paper that showed that backlinks can improve internet search results.
They decided to make a company out of it.
The company grew to the point where 80% of the world's population gives Google free business by choosing them to search the internet. This happens billions of times every day.
Google monetizes these searches by showing ads in the searches.
Google prints over $50 billion a year from this money printer called search ads.
In conclusion: they were smart guys that executed well in a space that they were insanely lucky to have fallen into.
They only other money printer of comparable size is Facebook, which was also executed well by a very smart guy, Mark Zuckerberg, in a space that he was insanely lucky to have fallen into.
Just a reminder, Zuckerberg stole what would become Facebook from the Winklevoss twins.
The design of the start page doesn't get mentioned enough, in the days of dial up, having that minimalist page was a big plus. I always knew google would load up in a second and I could start searching, others I might be waiting 30 seconds.
I was rereading Michael Lewis's "The New New Thing" a while back.
It was all about that late 90s period when Silicon Valley was gobbling up cash from private equity firms who wanted to make money on the stock market launches.
Long story short ... there's two lines about Google in this book .... "Out of fear of losing yet another very public success to Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins had paid $25 million for a 33 per cent stake in a new company called Google.com. Google.com consisted of a pair of Stanford graduate students who had a piece of software that might or might not make it easier to search the internet."
They were definitely smart, although it's worth noting that the part of Google that actually made the money (adwords) were developed by other people. They were responsible for the core search engine idea, of course, and without that the adwords would never have found traction.
This is what Jeeves told me wrote:
Smarter than Alta Vista!!
Page and Brin offered to sell their startup to Altavista for$1,000,000 in 1998. After Altavista declined, they made the same offer to Yahoo. Yahoo had another chance to acquire Google in 2002, but Yahoo CEO Terry Semel balked at Google's price tag of $5 billion.