The Google Boys: Larry Page and Serge Brin

The services that Google, Inc are one of the things we take for granted today. In fact, 20-years ago, you would have had to know every website you want to visit and type in exactly to access it.  There is no day that passes by without using any of the google services (youtube, google maps, google search engine, and many others).  As users, we get to use all these services for free, and Google makes their money from advertising services that they offer to different businesses, companies, and enterprises. Although they have received lots of backlash for tracking our online behavior and invading our privacy, I would say that it is a fair game for most users. I have used google to apply for jobs, internships that have shaped my career so far. I use it every day to search and look up everything I need whether I am visiting a new city, or looking for services  I need. No doubt, without google, my life would be very different and I would be honestly screwed. In this blog, I am taking you to how Google, Inc was created by two graduate students at Stanford University. We can all learn from their entrepreneurial spirit, their inventions, and most importantly their persistence and hardwork.

This video describes the starting of what is known today as Google, which is an internet search engine. The story starts with a research conducted by two P. h D students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their research was focused on data mining, which is a process of analyzing data from a different perspective and summarizing it into useful information.  At the beginning of their research, their purpose as P. h D computer scientists was to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful to the world. Therefore, they ended up building the internet search engine known as Google today.

After the completion of their project, they decided to sell their project/software to other companies that existed at that time such as Yahoo and Microsoft, but it did not work because those companies responded that they were not interested and that their method of searching information on internet was good enough. So, Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to start out their own company. The way that Google works is that they have a way of searching and downloading information from all world wide websites and sending information back to their superpower computer, which makes it available to the public. The company started growing because of its fast and easy internet search: in 1998, the company had 38-employees and was receiving 3-million queries a day, a year later; it received 16-million a day.  As the company grows, it started to find other investors putting their money into the company to grow and to stay on the top of other companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft. They started signing deals in China, Japan and Europe to expand their business. In order to improve the company performance, they introduced new methods of making money such advertising and at the same time the company started hiring new P. h D students as employees: By the year 2007, the company had about 10, 000 employees and received 100-million queries a day.  Now, one third of Google’s revenues come from advertising.

In 2004, the company was brought to public (Marketing) and it receives a lot of awards such as the academy’s Golden Award. For competition issues, other companies such Yahoo and Google started buying and introducing new search engines to compete with Google, but Google stayed at the top because of their new discoveries: online advertising, other service like Google map, Google earth, and Google phone. After the company became larger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired a new professional CEO to manage Google.

This project of these Google boys has a lot of connections with what I have personally learned in business and finance courses. For example, how Larry Page and his partner developed a research based on the public needs of accessing information easily because the search engines at that time were complicated and ineffective. After the company expanded, the Google boys started to publicize their product (Marketing) in other developing countries and started to find many investors. In addition, when other companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft noticed the progress of Google, they started developing and introducing their search engine to compete with Google (competition). In this video, I was also able to notice the role of ethics and social responsibility in business. In the interview given by Larry Page, he explained that recruited employees are those who not only are talented and intelligent, but also those who can fit the work environment of Google: independent research study and social friendship. In addition, when the company was growing, the founder of Google decided to hire a professional CEO to help manage the company’s wealth. This shows how management is a big part of business.

Finally, Google is now a well-respected company because its influence on the whole planet. The company has been successful since it is making a lot of money. At the same time, it creates jobs not only to founders, but also for Americans: its shareholders, customers, and investors. Today in April 2017, Alphabet, the parent company of google in worth around 550-billion dollars, which makes it the second most valuable company in the world. It also helps the public to get easy access of information on internet thanks to two hard-working computer scientist entrepreneurs Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

It is hard to think of my life without google today. All the information I need is just a “search and click away”, thanks to your genius brain of yours. I am and will be forever thankful.

With respect,

Didier Champion