Googled (52 page)

27
revenues that would reach . . . laptop PCs:
time line on
Microsoft.com
.

27
I visited Gates:
author interview with Bill Gates, 1998, for my book
World War 3.0 Microsoft and Its Enemies,
Random House, 2001.

28
“a reflexive belief”:
author interview with John Battelle, March 20, 2008.

28
“a penchant for pushing boundaries”:
“The Story of Sergey Brin,”
Moment,
February 2007.

28
Accounts of Michael and Eugenia Brin’s life in the Soviet Union and Sergey Brin’s boyhood from:
author interview with Brin, September 18, 2008;
Google Story,
David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, Bantam Dell, 2005; Mark Malseed, “The Story of Sergey Brin,”
Moment,
February 2007; and Guy Rolnik, “I’ve Been Very Lucky in My Life,”
Haaretz.com
, May 24, 2008.

30
“a nerd” ... “pretty inspiring”:
author interview with Brin, September 18, 2008, and Brin interview with the Academy of Achievement, a Museum of Living History, in Washington, D.C., October 28, 2000.

30
he was non-practicing . . . “I was never comfortable with that”:
Guy Rolnik, “I’ve Been Very Lucky in My Life,”
Haaretz.com
, May 24, 2008.

30
the couple stood in bathing suits:
Guy Rolnik, “I’ve Been Very Lucky in My Life,” Haaretz, May 24, 2008.

30
“What part of your success”:
author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008.

31
treated by faculty as a peer . . . maybe become a professor:
author interview with Brin, September 18, 2008.

31
“he passed all his tests”:
author interview with Craig Silverstein, September 17, 2007.

31
“We
were offended”:
author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008.

32
Larry was born:
e-mail exchange with Larry Page, April 24, 2009.

33
Larry was inspired . . . by
a
biography of Nikola Tesla:
author interview with Page, March 25, 2008; John Battelle,
Search: Inside Story of How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business,
Portfolio, 2005.

33 Page discusses childhood and Tesla in speech to the 2005 graduating class of engineers at the University of Michigan; http://
disruptionmatters.com/2007/12/14/larry-pages-commencement-speech-at-the-2005-university-of-michigan/
.

33
“I knew I was going to build a company eventually”:
Larry Page interview with the Academy of Achievement, a Museum of Living History, in Washington, D.C., October 28, 2000.

33
his grandfather, an assembly-line morker:
author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008.

33
“My dad actually said to me”:
Larry Page speech to graduates at the engineering school of the University of Michigan, 2005.

33 Larry Page discusses his grandfather, parents, and college years as the commencement speaker at the University of Michigan graduation ceremonies, May 2, 2009, and available online.

34
“I kept complaining”:
Page in
Michigan Engineer,
Spring/Summer 2001.

34
he was on the orientation team:
author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008.

35
“I was thinking: what if we could download the whole Web”:
Larry Page speech at University of Michigan graduation ceremonies, May 2, 2009 (available online).

35
Larry downloaded:
John Battelle,
Search,
Portfolio, 2005.

35
fifteen million people:
Mary Lu Carnevale, “The World-Wide Web,”
Wall Street Journal,
November 15, 1993.

36
memo to Bill Gates:
Nathan P. Myhrvold, “Impact of the Internet,” November 15, 1994, gathered by the author for a May 12, 1997, profile of Myhrvold in
The New Yorker.

36
Myhrvold presciently warned:
Nathan P. Myhrvold, “No More Middleman: The Broad Impact of the Internet,” November 27, 1995.

36
Bill Gates galvanized his troops:
“The Internet Tidal Wave,” May 25, 1995, and available via a Google search.

36
“In this report”:
Mary Meeker and Chris DePuy,
The Internet Report,
HarperBusiness, 1996.

37
“He had a dial-up Web connection”:
author interview with Mary Meeker, January 23, 2009.

37
twenty-two billion dollars on wireless services:
Mark Landler, “An Aerial Assault on the Wired Nation,” in the New York Times, February 26, 1996.

37
he drew a distinction between incremental changes:
Nathan P. Myhrvold, “Upcoming Sea Changes,” January 29, 1995.

37
“how things work” :
author interview with Terry Winograd, September 25, 2007.

37
“the paradox of technology”:
Donald A. Norman,
Design of Everyday Things,
Basic Books, 1988.

37
an obsession of Larry’s:
author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008.

38
disdained games like
golf:
author interview with Omid Kordestani, April 15, 2008.

38
“two swords sharpening each other”:
author interview with John Battelle, March 20, 2008.

38
“they were not”:
author interview with Terry Winograd, September 25, 2007.

38
Page and Brin’s breakthrough:
Search,
John Battelle.

39
“they didn’t have this false
respect”:
author interview with Rajeev Motwani, October 12, 2007.

39
snuck onto the loading dock:
author interview with Terry Winograd: September 16, 2008.

39
“We wanted to finish school”:
Page and Schmidt appearance at Stanford, May 1, 2002, available on YouTube.

40
“You guys can always come back”:
author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008; confirmed in a May 5, 2008 e-mail to the author from Jeffrey Ullman.

40
They chose the name Google:
Sergey Brin interview with John Ince on PodVentureZone, January 2000.

40
“two important features”:
Page and Brin, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”; a printed version, “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web,” was published January 29, 1998, and is available on the Web.

40
“Brin and Page . . . are expressing a desire”:
Nicholas Carr,
Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google,
W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

41
“They were . . . part of an engineering tribe”:
author interview with Lawrence Lessig, March 30, 2009.

41
“This is going to change the way”:
author interview with Rajeev Motwani, October 12, 2007.

41
“free of many of the old prejudices”:
Nicholas Negroponte,
Being Digital,
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1995.

42
“Fortunately, I had taken up lock picking”:
author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008.

42
They “thought it was sleazy”:
author interview with Rajeev Motwani, October 12, 2007.

43
“I’ll take stock”:
author interview with Craig Silverstein, September 17, 2007.

43 Information about Google’s early days in 1998 from author interviews with Ram Shriram, September 16, 2008, and June 12, 2008; Craig Silverstein, September 14, 2007, and September 17, 2007; Jeff Bezos, July 9, 2008; Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008; and Susan Wojcicki, September 10, 2007, and April 16, 2008.

45
ten thousand search queries:
Google’s “Google Milestones” chronology

45
Search really “does have a potential”:
Karsten Lamm,
Stern,
January 1999.

46
one million dollars received from its four initial investors:
Google’s IPO document, August 2004.

46
Google had indexed only about 10 percent . . . five hundred thousand daily:
author interview with Marissa Mayer, August 21, 2007.

47
“a graduate-student Disneyland”:
Michael Specter, “Search and Deploy: The Race to Build a Better Search Engine,” The New
Yorker,
May 29, 2000.

47
A green Ping-Pong table . . . “ ‘Do you speak?’
”: author interviews with Marissa Mayer, March 25, 2008, and November 4, 2008.

47
five-million-dollar penthouse ... in Palo Alto:
Julian Guthrie, “Googirl,”
San Francisco Magazine,
March 2008, confirmed by a close colleague of hers.

48
“we need a business plan”:
author interview with Ram Shriram, September 16, 2008.

48
“a binder on what other companies were doing”:
author interview with Salar Kamangar, March 27, 2008.

48
Kordestani was a perfect fit ... “It was a very thoughtful process”:
author interview with Omid Kordestani, April 15, 2008.

49
Drummond remembers:
author interview with David Drummond, September 11, 2007.

50
David Krane was working ... “the Interlochen uniform”:
author interview with David Krane, April 18, 2008.

51
“Google wanted to create”:
Ruth Kedar blog entry, January 15, 2008.

52
Ron Conway ... “more famous than I am!”:
author interview with Ron Conway, March 25, 2008.

52
Danny Sullivan ... “science” of their search results:
author interviews with Danny Sullivan, August 27, 2007, and March 20, 2008.

53
“had a purist view”:
author interview with Ram Shiram, September 16, 2008.

53
Barry Diller... “wildly self-possessed”:
author interview with Barry Diller, March 3, 2009.

53
the founders “were on a mission”:
author interview with Susan Wojcicki, September 10, 2007.

54
They set out to recruit:
author interview with Ram Shriram, September 16, 2008. Another account of the negotiations with Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia was provided by John Heilemann in GQ, March 2005.

54
Doerr remembers the meeting vividly:
author interview with John Doerr, September 18, 2008.

54
“devotion to their dream”:
author interview with Michael Moritz, August 23, 2007.

55
“The understanding when we invested”:
author interview with Michael Moritz, August 23, 2007.

55
“I think of him as Kobe Bryant”:
author interview with Ram Shriram, June 12, 2008.

55
They also held their first press conference:
Google home movie, June 7, 1999, shared with author by Google.

56
“Big deal”:
author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008.

56
“We got overwhelmed with traffic”:
author interview with Craig Silverstein, September 17, 2007.

56
figure out how to block pornography searches:
author interview with Matt Cutts, August 20, 2007.

57
called in a real estate agent:
author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008.

57
“Chef Audition Week”:
author interview with Marissa Mayer, March 25, 2008.

57
“The fat found in fish”:
interview with Charlie Ayers, Advancedengineeringbd .com, March 23, 2008.

57
“I think they were a little bit perturbed”:
author interview with Sergey Brin, October 10, 2007.

58
The first place in the valley Al Gore visited... “It was hilarious!”:
author interview with Al Gore, June 10, 2008.

58
At around 4:30 ... “Which prize?”:
author attended this and all other Google TGIF’s described.

59
Doerr described Sergey:
author interview with John Doerr, September 18, 2008.

60
game show:
To Tell the Truth,
March 10, 2001, available on YouTube.

60
“Larry can be a little raw”:
author interview with Megan Smith, April 17, 2008.

60
a fashionable cocktail party:
author attended party for 23andMe, September 9, 2008.

61
7 million searches a day:
Google Web site.

61
NASDAQ ... fell 78 percent:
“How the Web Was Won,”
Vanity Fair,
July 2008.

61
“Ax in any successful venture”:
author interview with Hal Varian, March 27, 2008.

61
revenues would total
$19.1
million:
Google August 2004 IPO filing with the SEC.

61
“zero discussion”:
author interview with Salar Kamangar, March 27, 2008.

61
an encounter around this time with Page and Brin and Bill Gross:
John Battelle,
Search,
Portfolio, 2005.

62.
established Google as Yahoo’s official search engine:
Randall Stross,
Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know,
Simon & Schuster, 2008; also Vise and Malseed and Battelle books.

62.
3.7 million shares:
Google’s Form-1 Registration Statement from IPO filing, August 2004.

62
“It was really about the quality of the search”:
author interview with Danny Sullivan, March 20, 2008.

63
moving too gingerly for Doerr and Moritz:
author interview with Doerr, September 18, 2008, and Moritz, August 23, 2007.

64
“They thought everyone ... was
a
clown”:
author interview with Paul Buchheit, June 9, 2008.

64
“they wanted a fellow intellectual”:
author interview with Omid Kordestani, April 15, 2008.

64
“they were not convinced”:
author interview with Marissa Mayer, November 4, 2008.

64
“They resisted hiring ordinary people”:
author interview with Micheal Moritz, August 23, 2007.

64
“All of us on the board”:
author interviews with Ram Shriram, June 12, 2008, and September 16, 2008, and with Michael Moritz, August 23, 2007, and March 31, 2009.

65
“It was chaos”:
author interview with Tim Armstrong, February 28, 2008.

65
The founders interviewed two computer scientists:
author interview with Marissa Mayer, November 4, 2008.

65
indexed one billion Web pages:
Google Web site.

65
$19 million ... $14.6 million:
Google Form S-1, filed with the SEC on August 18, 2004.