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B'nai B'rith Magazine
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Spring 2006 |
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The Searchmeisters
Not long ago, two young iconoclasts created a company with a memorably goofy name. Nobody's laughing anymore. If you don't believe that, you can google it.
By Mark Malseed
It wasn't supposed to work out like this.
Sergey Brin, a math and computer whiz from an academically-oriented family of Russian Jews, had always figured he would earn a Ph.D. and become a professor, as his father and grandfather had.
And Larry Page, the youngest son of a pioneering computer scientist, and a standout engineering student himself, also had every intention of following his father's footsteps into academia.
By all logic, the two should now be young college professors, doing research, teaching freshmen, fighting for tenure. Instead, they sit atop the fastest-growing company in American history, fly around the world in their very own 767, and wonder what they're going to do next year when they both turn 34.
How did Brin and Page rise from modest beginnings to become two of the richest and most influential business tycoons on the planet? The answer has as much to do with their personalities and family backgrounds as it does with the groundbreaking Internet search technology they developed as Stanford doctoral students.
As the founders and visionary leaders of a seven-year-old company called Google, Brin and Page have revolutionized the way we seek and find information about nearly everything. They have made "search"-once an arcane and tedious chore best left to geeks-into a daily staple for kids and grandparents alike, and spawned a catchy new verb to describe it too. Along the way, they built a booming, $130-billion enterprise with global reach that has executives from Madison Ave. to Silicon Valley walking around with their heads on a swivel.
Wired magazine calls the phenomenon "Googlephobia."
Operating with "a healthy disregard for the impossible," as Page likes to say, the Google Guys think big and move fast. Paying no mind to precedent, they aggressively seek to fix what they see as inefficient or unfair, be it a technology, the workplace culture, government regulations, or the ways of Wall Street. New products are pushed out the door at a blistering pace, often even before they are perfected-Page's way of keeping innovation humming and competitors on their toes.
Though they might avoid using the word themselves, Brin and Page have no shortage of chutzpah. It has propelled them forward at key moments, as when Page told his Stanford professors that he was going to download the entire Internet onto his personal computer. (They thought he was crazy, but he eventually did it.) Or when the pair, desperate for money to grow the business, nevertheless told would-be investors that any deal would have to be done strictly on Google's terms. (The potential backers eventually agreed.)
"If Larry and Sergey were given clear instructions by a divine presence, they would still have questions," says Michael Moritz, one of the two venture capitalists who in 1999 invested a combined $25 million in Google.
To some, the Guys came off as both arrogant and naive, earning them a reputation for being difficult to deal with. But in the mouse-eat-mouse world of Silicon Valley start-ups, their insistence on doing it their way also helped set them apart.
"They had a great sense of purpose, which is a prerequisite for anyone who is nutty enough to want to start a company," says Moritz. "That burning sense of conviction is what you need to overcome the inevitable obstacles."
One such hurdle was meager operating revenue. Google cleared that obstacle in 2001 when it started displaying small text ads alongside search results-a smart, subdued approach to advertising that soon transformed the search engine into a money machine. Within three years, the company was drawing revenues of $10 million a day, one click at a time.
Yet the founders' mission is much broader and bolder than mere searching: They want to organize all of the world's information and make it universally accessible, whatever the consequences. This includes scanning millions of books without the explicit permission of publishers, compiling a database of genetic and biological information, and tracing and indefinitely storing the searches and e-mails of individual computer users-actions that put Brin and Page on a collision course with copyright lawyers, governments, and cherished notions of personal privacy. As these projects unfold, Washington (and we the public) will be watching closely.
None of this appears to ruffle the Guys. They have more than 5,000 employees, tons of cash, a massive computer infrastructure that gives them a formidable edge on most competitors, and a gilded brand name in Google (which actually is a misspelling of googol, an enormously large number). With more than a billion dollars a year in profits, and a stock market value greater than that of General Motors, Ford, Disney, and Time Warner combined, Google is in many ways setting the technology agenda for the world.
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