Larry & Sergey (Google)

Karsten Lemm, a correspondent for the German newsmagazine Stern, knocked on the door of an apartment house in Menlo Park to interview Brin and Page for an article about Silicon Valley and its start-up culture. Next to the doorbell, a sign caught his eyes. In handwritten letters it said, “Google World Headquarters”. Inside, a handful of twenty-somethings were working on their PCs – mostly in the kitchen. The garage, Silicon Valley’s perennial symbol of entrepreneurship, was overflowing with mountain bikes, knick-knack, and empty computer boxes.
[...]
How did Google start?

Larry: Basically I started doing my Phd. research on the link structure of the Web, about 3 1/2 years ago. And then I got other people interested; Sergey started working on this soon after.

Sergey: I was at the time working on data mining.

Larry: We’re both Phd. students at Stanford, computer science. We’re taking a leave-of-absence. It just seemed like this was a really good opportunity. Craig [Silverstein, Google employee no. 1] and I have very little left to do, but the world doesn’t wait.

Was it difficult to find funding?

Sergey: Basically, we talked to our advisers and other faculty whom we knew. And they just pointed us to other people. Pretty soon, we had investors, we had a lawyer, we had everything that we needed. We got more money than expected. We worked on a business plan for a little bit, but we were basically never even asked for it. Recently we got an e-mail from one of our investors saying, “Oh, do you guys have a business plan? I don’t think I ever saw one.”

Larry: To be fair: We told these guys what we wanted to do and they asked us good questions and they know enough to know what we’re doing.

Sergey: This is based on three years of research. We have a running prototype.

Larry: And we’ve had a lot of contact with the people in the industry. It’s not like we were random students walking in saying, “Hey, we would like some money!”

Sergey: Everybody who we talked to wanted to invest. No exceptions. Now, we get probably 5 to 10 e-mails every day [from potential investors]. We collect their names. We’ll have to decide [at some point] what we want to do. It’s not necessarily that sensible to have hundreds of smaller investors rather than a few big ones.

Aren’t you rather late to the game?

Larry: It’s possible to do a much better job on search, and it’s the main application that people use on the Internet. So there’s a big opportunity, because if you do a better job really matters to people.
People make decisions based on information they find on the Web. So companies that are in-between people and their information are in a very powerful position. There’s clearly space there for other players.

Sergey: Our experience has been that users are very sensitive to the quality of the search responsiveness. When we make minor changes to our system that we think nobody will notice, there’s a very clear response in our traffic. Users may not even realize but subconsciously they end up using your search engine because it works better for them. Users end up going where the search is best.
As we watched our traffic grow time and time again to beyond capacity we’re really not concerned about [being late to the game].
Larry: There’s also lots of big companies that might want to buy a search engine. It’s not an easy technology to develop, and we’ve done a pretty good job. We think we have the best search.

[...]

Do you ever consider the risks?

Larry: Silicon Valley is a little bit different. There’s not so much risk to us. If you fail in starting your company, you’re actually more fundable. You may have fail
ed for some reason not involving yourself at all, just [due to] some random factors.

Sergey: The main risk is really our time. We’re working much, much harder than we would in a normal job. It’s not a 40 hour a week job.
We’ve been trying to cut down. When we started we’d be working upwards of 12 hours a day, six days a week. But be have been trying to cut down, because we think this isn’t necessarily most productive. We try hard to take at least one of the weekend days off, and at times both or at least portions of both.
Larry: Web companies especially are like 24 hour businesses. You just have to keep things running. When something breaks it needs to be fixed right away. So there are demands, I think, even beyond normal start-ups. Sergey: Anyway, we’re trying to push it down below 60 hours.

What’s the main part of your work?

Sergey: There are more main parts than we care to have. We try to offload as much as we can to our employees [but] we still do a lot of lower-level programming.
Then, we spend a lot of time talking to people in other companies and to VCs, any kind of strategic contact. And we need to do some kind of high-level strategic planning for the company.
The other thing we do, by the way, is, taking out the garbage, bringing food for people, making sure we have the phone lines, ordering computers, taking care of the “everything else” category.
Starting Monday, we’ll have 6 full-time employees. This week we have 5, last week we had 4. I think it’s going to keep growing at that pace for a while.

At some point, the goal is the IPO …?

Larry: Of course, yeah.

Sergey: There are several possible places where we can take Google. One is to get bought out. After that, we’d still continue to work on it. The other possibility is the IPO. I think it would be much more exciting for us to make Google stand on its own. But both are possibilities.

Do your investors talk about a day when they expect to earn their money back?

Sergey: Not really. I mean, they talk about schedules to IPO. That’s when they can cash out. But in terms of actually becoming a profitable company and eventually paying dividends or something like that – people don’t bother talking about that, that’s very far down the line.
It certainly doesn’t make sense to try to become profitable tomorrow and stay small, rather than keep spending the money and capture ten times as much market share.
Larry: Clearly, if you’re providing a service to the whole world, you have to have a fairly big company.

Do you generate any revenue at the moment?

Sergey: You caught us at an interesting time. Right now, we’re thinking about generating some revenue. We have a number of ways to doing that. One thing is we can put up some advertising. The key there is to put up advertising that will be really useful to our users and not slow down our site. That way we won’t push people away from our site, but we’ll still take in some revenue. Another way would be co-branding. Provide the back-end search engine to other sites.

How do you see Google develop? At some point, do you see yourselves on par with AltaVista, Excite, all these other established search engines?

Sergey: I would say no. We want to be on par with Yahoo, or Amazon, AOL. AltaVista, Excite and [the others] are by no means viewed as the winners. 
There’s no question, we want to be number one in market share in terms of search. And I think we can do that in not so long. Past that, it’s really hard to predict. 
There’s really no reason to set our sights low. If you do things right you can make a big jump over everybody else.

Larry Page, what is responsible for your early progress in life? How did you get to where you are so quickly?

Larry Page: I think I was really lucky to have the environment I did when I was growing up. My dad was a professor, he happened to be a professor of computer science, and we had computers lying around the house from a really early age. I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document. I just enjoyed using the stuff. It was sort of lying around, and I got to play with it. I had an older brother who was interested in it as well. So I think I had kind of a unique environment, that most people didn't have, because my dad was willing to spend all his available income on buying a computer or whatever. It was like 1978, when I was six. I don't think there's many people my age who've had that experience, or anyone in general. From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and also then, soon after, in business, because I figured that inventing things wasn't any good; you really had to get them out into the world and have people use them to have any effect. So probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.

[...]

It's an almost an impossible task, but it's an exciting task, and one that you can get other people excited about, and they can help you, and one of the things that also surprised me that it's sometimes easier to do something that's harder because other people get excited about it and you can get much more resources, you can get tremendous resources to solve a hard problem, whereas you might only get minor resources to solve a small problem. 

How do you think you knew at such an early age that you wanted to be an inventor? [GREAT follow-up question!]

Larry Page: I just sort of kept having ideas. We had a lot of magazines lying around our house. It was kind of messy. So you kind of read stuff all the time, and I would read Popular Science and things like that. I just got interested in stuff, I guess, technology and how devices work. My brother taught me how to take things apart, and I took apart everything in the house. So I just became interested in it, for whatever reason, and so I had lots of ideas about what things could be built and how to build them and all these kinds of things. I built like an electric go-cart at a pretty early age.

It's as if computers were the toys of your childhood.

Larry Page: Yeah, basically, and electronics too.

You mentioned reading magazines like Popular Mechanics. What else did you read that might have influenced or inspired you in some way?

Larry Page: I read all the computer magazines and things like that, and I was sort of interested in how these things really work -- anything having to do with the mechanics behind things, either the mechanics or the electronics. I wanted to be able to build things. Actually, in college I built an inkjet printer out of Legos, because I wanted to be able to print really big images. I figured you could print really big posters really cheaply using inkjet cartridges. So I reverse-engineered the cartridge, and I built all the electronics and mechanics to drive it. Just sort of fun projects. I like to be able to do those kinds of things.

You certainly have an aptitude for it. Is this because of your early education or your parents? How do you explain that?

Larry Page: Actually, my brother was nine years older than me, and he went to Michigan as well. He brought home some of his labs for electronics and things like that, and sort of gave them to me. I learned how to do the stuff. I think there were a lot of lucky things like that.

You seem to have had no fear of any of this. Where does this self-confidence come from?

Larry Page: I think that's true of kids today as well. If you have access to these things at a really young age, you just become used to it all, and it is natural to you. Kids certainly don't have fear of using computers now. It's the same kind of thing. If you grow up in environments where you have ICs (integrated circuits) lying around, you don't have fear of that either.

At what age would you say you had this realization? [the realization that computers were an incredibly powerful source of leverage]

Sergey Brin: In middle school, I had very good friend who I'm still in touch with, he had a Macintosh, one of the early ones, and he and I would just sit and play around and program. We had little programs for artificial intelligence. We'd have a program that would talk back to you. We wrote a program to simulate gravity. I remember we wrote a program to do what's called "OCR" now, optical character recognition. It was just for fun, purely out of intellectual curiosity. I think that's probably the first time I really experienced that.

Were there any particular books that were especially important to you along the way?

Sergey Brin: I remember really enjoying (Richard) Feynman's books. He had several autobiographical books, and I read them. It seemed like a very great life he led. Aside from making really big contributions in his own field, he was pretty broad-minded. I remember he had an excerpt where he was explaining how he really wanted to be a Leonardo, an artist and a scientist. I found that pretty inspiring. I think that leads to having a fulfilling life. Beyond that, just within the computer field, there are classical books I still find impressive, like Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. That was really ten years ahead of its time. It kind of anticipated what's going to happen, and I find that really interesting.

[...]

Certainly, you weren't the only ones with that objective [to help people find useful information] at the time, but you two did something about it. How do you account for that?

Sergey Brin: That's true. Certainly anyone can say, "Oh, I want to build a car that is going to cost $5 and go 500 miles an hour," and that would be great. I was fortunate to be at Stanford, and I was really interested in data mining, which means analyzing large amounts of data, discovering patterns and trends. And at the same time, Larry joined Stanford in '95, and he started downloading the Web, which it turns out to be the most interesting data you can possibly mine. Our joint effort, just looking at the data out of curiosity, we found that we had technology to do a better job of search, and from that initial technology, we got really interested in the problem, and we realized how impactful having great search can be. So we built technology upon technology after that, to bring Google to where it is today, and we continue to develop lots of technology for tomorrow.

Why is it that you perceived the need for Google before anyone else did?

Larry Page: Well, it's actually a great argument for pure research. 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 advisor 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. In computer science, there's a lot of big graphs. Right now, (the Web) has like 5 billion edges and 2 billion nodes. 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 10,000 people who link to Stanford. Then the question is, which ones do you show? So you can only show 10, 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, [so Page had the core idea before Sergey was involved?] 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."

Larry, you're a CEO at 27. What challenges or frustrations have you experienced at reaching this station at such a young age?

Larry 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. [Nathan: age discrimination is the civil rights issue of our generation!] Certainly, I think, the things that I'm missing are more things that you acquire with time. If you manage people for 20 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, 24 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.

It appears that it's people of your generation who have really introduced the so-called "24/7 mentality." Are you aware of that? Do you think that accounts for your success?

Larry 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.

What else are you doing these days?

Larry Page: I think I am really lucky. Being in the Bay Area, a lot of my friends have started companies that have been quite successful at different stages. So I go up to San Francisco and I hang out with my friends, and we talk about their companies and all sorts of different things. It is fun, but it is also work in some sense. I think within Silicon Valley there is really a mix of recreation and work a lot of times.

Where do you go from here? What do you see yourself doing in ten or 20 years?

Larry Page: I think Google is great because, basically artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So we have the ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. That's obviously artificial intelligence, to be able to answer any question, basically, because almost everything is on the Web, right? We're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on. And that's tremendously interesting from an intellectual standpoint.

[...]

On the other hand, I do have a lot of other interests as well. I am really interested in transportation and sustainable energy. For fun, I invent things on the side, but I don't really have time to follow up on them.

Sergey, to ask you a different question, what would you like to be remembered for, down the road?

Sergey Brin: [...] 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.

[...]

Larry Page; [...] When I was in Michigan, I tried to get them to build a monorail between central and north campus, because it is only a two-mile trip, and they have 40 full-sized diesel buses that run back and forth. Two miles! So that's a prime candidate for new transportation. [lesson: be proactive! I would not have thought to suggest a project so large to my college.]

Is there any reason for you to go back to Stanford and finish your degree? You have taken leave of absence from Stanford to be a CEO. Why bother to go back at all?

Larry Page: Well, I think Stanford is a really great place. There's really, really smart people around, and it's really a fun place to be. Some people from other startups have gone back when things sort of calmed down. So it does happen. There are things I want to work on that are very speculative, and Stanford is a great place to do things like that. I didn't start out building a search engine. I just said, "Oh, the links on the Web are probably interesting. Why don't we try doing something with that?" I was pretty lucky that it was a useful thing to do. If you're doing something you're not sure is going to work at all, a company probably isn't the right place to be doing it. Having incredibly bright people around to work with is a really nice thing. I could see going back for that purpose.

6:09 - Larry: Most companies, I do think their leaders are pretty short-term focused. You know, I've given people the question, "Imagine you're running Exxon; what do you do? Say you want to do something good, with what's the most-valuable company on Earth, a lot of people think it's probably not doing good things, worried about the environment and so on." [He goes on to say that the problem is that the CEOs of these companies are only there for about 4 years, so it's hard for them to solve big problems. It's easier to solve a big problem in 20 years, but the CEOs don't have the power to stick around that long.]