What were the key decisions that Page & Brin made in the early days of Google? | Hacker News Reader

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

quora.com

55 pointsaniobi17 comments

Larry Page's brother Carl Page had experience with venture capitalists, having sold eGroups to Yahoo for $432 million.

I did not know that.

I did know Bill Gates' mom was on the United Way executive committee with IBM's CEO.

I think these details are often omitted because we like to promote the idea that all you need is hard work and talent and perhaps a bit of luck to succeed.

We tend to not like stories about success as a function of familiar ties. This may have something to do with our distaste for monarchies and aristocracies.

It's also a bit depressing when you're working on a startup but no one in your family is well off, and no one is on a board with the CEO of a huge and potential partner, and your brother did not sell his startup for hundreds of millions.

Think of it from Carl Page's perspective, then: his brother had not yet sold his startup for hundreds of millions.

Very nicely put!

A have-vs-have-not mindset can creep in easily and get you down on yourself before you've realized it. But so what if someone else has more advantages? I might not have a rich anyone or well-connected anyone to help me, but I have countless other advantages others don't have as well, that I should be thankful for, and work hard to make good on deserving them. Thanks for the reminder :)

You both make good points.

It is still amazing what they did with what they had, despite the fact that they had more than the average person.

However, there is no denying that they were lucky to have that money in the first place so that they could wait until their company was valued more and they had to give less away to VCs. I wonder how many startups had to give away their autonomy for badly needed cash? A large number no doubt.

From Carl Page's perspective: his brother had not yet sold his startup for hundreds of millions. It is quite a feat that he was able to do it by himself. But if Carl Page did have those hundreds of millions as a possible source of funding, could he have kept his startup from VCs longer and had more autonomy in it, and perhaps sold it for billions?

eGroups wasn't sold to Yahoo until August 2000 (after it IPO'd, actually), 2 years after Google was founded. Larry Page didn't have any more money available than any other Stanford grad student with a professor dad. He did have the experience of having a family member who'd gone through the VC process, but lots of people know people who've taken VC.

So true. I've often read interviews with founders and things get very vague around the "how did you pay bills before you had revenue" question. It becomes pretty clear that there was some family money, but it's not talked about since it takes away from the pure bootstrapped ideal. I wish there would be more honesty about it though, because it's still an amazing accomplishment to start a company, and it might help founders to get a more accurate picture of what's involved.

Agreed. The fact that Page and Brin were both smart and made many good decisions early (well, decisions that later seemed to pay off from them, which is approximately equivalent, but not exactly the same) was a major contributor. But I find it hard to believe that the fact that one of them had a brother who sold a business for $432 million did not help them significantly as well. In two ways: yes the connections, but also the fact you could potentially go to a brother rather than a total stranger and get millions of dollars to invest. Unlike a lot of current Lean/Agile/Web2.0 startups, Google couldn't exactly just rent computing nodes from EC2 at the time, they had to buy or build them, which costs lots of cash upfront. "Carl, remember that time I promised not to tell mom about who really broke her vase? I'm calling that in now."

Yeah it does remind me of Bill Gates a lot too. Smart guy, smart decisions, but also a family with wealth and powerful connections.

This appeared on HN 250 days ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502765

As pg and paul (Buchheit - Google employee #23) point out, the top answer is inaccurate and misleading about what factors were really important.

As paul said: Unfortunately it's written in an authoratative style, so people assume it's true and upvote, demonstrating one of the major flaws in vote based systems.

Also summary section now contains bogus items which are not mentioned in the answers at all. Way to go Quora.

Discussed pretty heavily here, with a rebuttal to the top post from pg and Buchheit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502765

I suggest that one should read the thread completely in that discussion, as I have done just now, rather than arrive at the quick conclusion that this guy is clearly wrong. As far as I understand, the points given are wrong per se, but just that pg and Buchheit just think that other factors were more important.

I think that (unless you're a historian or somesuch) asking what is the most important 1-2 factors in the success of a person and or company is not very profitable, one should have the larger picture so you can emulate it.

From the answers, my important takeaways to emulate are:

1) Single out what you think is innovative/right/awesome, pursue it relentlessly and let no one hinder you (tech pundits, VCs, board, etc)

2) Be knowledgeable with history of other companies (e.g. why they failed-succeeded) and current dynamics (e.g. the Microsoft-Netscape competition mentioned)

3) Create company culture from day one (one problem with the highest answer is that it never mentions this well-known factor) and don't let it get diluted (OK< maybe after 20K employees)

4) Don't sell out when you see a pile of cash (or do quickly, if your belief in (1) is now gone, before others notice too)

I was the 4th guy there, only stayed a while because I wanted to do my own thing.

The thing that struct me the first time I went into the house in menlo park where they got started was that instead of techy books on their desks, there were stacks of books on hiring. That was new to me, usually the geeks are thinking about engineering and if not that, marketing.

I stopped reading after "Early NSA partnership."

I think he meant "Early Netscape partnership". Netscape is apparently the NSA now. Who knew?

Here's my stab (probably about as accurate as any of the misleading answers on quora):

0: realizing that search was important on its own (it wasn't a loss leader or a gimmick to get people to visit your portal where the real content and money making happened)

1: using cutting edge research to improve search result quality based on human factors (page rank)

2: using cutting edge computer science to create highly efficient search systems through sharding and aggressive parallelization.

3: facilitating aggressive parallelization through highly automated data center operations relying on large quantities of consumer grade hardware.

4: continuing concentration on human factors (UI simplicity, search result speed, unobtrusive advertisements, etc.)

All of these together made google a juggernaut, with some of them google would have been successful but maybe not dominant, with all of them nobody could touch google so long as they managed to monetize well. Better search results faster at lower cost per query and with much higher click-through rates for ads. That's a world beating formula right there.

Just do it. Now.

Not all the decisions we're made by them, you'd probably also have to thank Yahoo and a bunch of other companies for refusing to buy them.

I can only imagine how Yahoo would have destroyed that company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com