Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally wanted Google to be a pay-to-use service and were against ads. I don't know how they came to their change in business model, but I suspect it was after they hired people that weren't engineers to help.
Schmidt joined Google in March 2001. For all of 1999 Google only had $220,000 in revenue (founded Sept 1998). Their early, primitive experiments in advertising worked well enough, they brought in $19m in revenue for 2000 (which would increase 300% in 2001, and then 400% in 2002).
[1] 2013: https://slate.com/business/2013/10/googles-big-break-how-bil...
[2] 2005: https://www.gq.com/story/google-larry-sergey
> Schmidt met all of Larry and Sergey's stringent criteria. He had a credible name, a Ph.D. (from Berkeley), and he promised not to push the boys aside or dismantle the quirky culture they'd engendered. "The board members told me, basically, 'Don't screw this thing up!' " Schmidt says. "They said, 'It needs some infrastructure, some growing, but the gem here is very real.'"
Has there been another company since Google that grew so fast? $19mil revenue in 2yrs, then tripling and quadrupling.
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GRPN/groupon/reven...
Slack - 3 years Twilio - ~5 years ServiceNow - 6 years Shopify - 7 years
They had $583 million in sales for 1983. $1.5 billion in today's dollar. They hit basically $1b the next year, at $982 million for 1984 (in 1984 dollars). Inflation adjusted I'm guessing they hit the $1 billion mark at about six years in business.
I similarly recall that Compaq grew extremely fast. Dell's liftoff followed a similar trajectory (the start was a bit slower, due to how Michael Dell started the company).
Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements. Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors. As one Google executive quoted by Zuboff put it, “Larry [Page] opposed any path that would reveal our technological secrets or stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-ho...
For years, they required that all their hires could program, even those in completely unrelated roles.