What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

There are really only TWO decisions that google made that made them successful. When something works, people like to go back and look at complicated things and say that those are the reasons it worked. The reason that google beat the others were really very simple and they had to do with the front-end only:

1. They were the simplest to use at the time. All the other search engine things had a lot of frills and pages and ads and so on. Google was just very plain, and as a result, simple

2. By default, they included ALL the words you typed in. Competitors at the time were trying to maximise search results by searching for each word individually, which led to a lot of irrelevant results. Just by including all the words in the query, google had a much better hit rate

All the rest was unimportant. Those two simply front-end decisions made the google search engine loved by the geeky anti-corporate people who ruled the web at the time (slashdot, linux advocates), and they recommended it to everyone who was joining the net. By appealing to the geeks, who then acted as the authority figures to the normals, google was able to take over the search market back then.

It was really not that complicated.

Yup. At a time when everyone else had given up on search, mainly because they thought that was as good as it could possibly get and thus the future was in other "value add" areas such as portals and directories, Google's founders saw a way to do it better. They married multiple revolutionary innovations (page rank, commodity PCs as servers, sharded computation / "datacenter as a system") and combined with a little bit of usability sense they provided higher quality search results which rendered faster and at lower per result costs.

What they did was enter an existing market with a lot of competition and do something that the competition was absolutely incapable of matching without going back to the drawing board (there are a few other companies who do this too, the list is left as an exercise for the reader). They followed it up with new ways of advertising online that made search a money maker.

The two of you are looking at their success from opposite directions. You're looking Google from day zero and asking, "Why were they successful at all?" The first answer looks at their mammoth success and asks, "How did they avoid becoming a smaller company as they grew?" The answer isn't as simple as the initial design of Google, or how they managed investors. They took hundreds of great small steps in the beginning that made them number one. Cultural ones, such as free food, "don't be evil," and hiring the best people. Technical ones, like BigTable, MapReduce, the Google File System, and their obsessive focus on operations. Business ones, like the terms of their IPO and their managing of VCs. And entrepreneurial ones, like 20% time, acquiring lots of startups, and awarding employee bonuses by product usage. "In the early days" is a fuzzy measure, but these are all decisions that Google has made to continually grow their company in value

Paul, I wrote that answer to be concise. I am not trying to write another book on Google. When you build a Google, you can tell me I am wrong.

Everyone I have spoken to that has built a successful company has told me that their ability to manage the long term interests of their company was impaired by losing control of their board of directors.

If Mark Zuckerberg did not have control of his board, the company would have been sold to Yahoo for just under a billion dollars, where Facebook would have died. The Yahoo executives wanted to "Nascar up the site". It would not be a 30 billion dollar dollar company today if the board had been investor controlled.

The reason Friedster failed was that the company was managed from the board of directors by investors which did not use their product. The founders of Friendster were screaming at the board of directors that the website took 40 seconds to load, but the board was more concerned with expanding into new markets and adding features, rather than solving the scalability issues the company was facing. Myspace copied Friendster, solved the scalability issues and dominated until Facebook introduced the feed and notification mechanism and took the college demographic.

If you want to build a long term success like Google, you have to be in a position to ignore your investor's short term desire to improve the company's financials by sacrificing long term growth. The quickest way to increase your margins is to reduce investment in the future.

Most of Google's costs were from their consuming facing search product. Almost all of Google's revenues were from enterprise search. Dropping consumer facing search would have improved Google's financials for sale or IPO. Everyone at the time believed that search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the management team did not have board control, the decisions that would have been forced on the company would had led Google to a different, much grimmer corporate destiny.

The management team at Google believed strongly in the future of internet search and the growth of online advertising. They saw the potential of using search queries to target advertisements and that search engines were uniquely positioned to monetize lead generation; at a time when search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the company had cut its loss centers and focused on its profit centers, the company would not have been as successful as it is today. The operating autonomy of Google's management team was critical to Google's long term success.

I do not care what Paul Buchheit says. Eric Schmidt has on several occasions discussed the advantages of Google's ownership structure and how it enabled Google to ignore outside influences and focus on the long term success of the company. If Paul Buchheit disagrees with the CEO of Google about the importance of Google's ownership structure and the operational autonomy of the management team, then its unfortunate.

God bless you.

This is the most reasonable thing I have seen said here.