Google’s Founders Almost Sold Their Dorm Room Project
In 1999, two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were getting distracted. Their research project, a search engine they called BackRub, was consuming too much of their time and Stanford's bandwidth. They just wanted to get back to their studies.
Their solution? Sell the company. They approached George Bell, the CEO of then-dominant web portal Excite, with an offer. After some negotiation, the price tag for the technology that would one day be valued in the trillions was a mere $750,000. Bell passed, not once, but twice. The reason wasn't just about the money. According to Bell, part of Page's demand was that Excite would have to replace its own search technology with Google's. For a company built on being a "portal" designed to keep users on-site, Google's uncanny ability to send users away to the right answer quickly was a business-model-breaking threat. The deal fell apart, forcing Page and Brin to continue on their own, and within months they secured $25 million in venture capital.
Yahoo! Was Originally Just a Hobby List
Before Yahoo! became a search giant, it was just “Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web.” In 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo weren't trying to build a multi-billion dollar corporation; they were just trying to keep track of their favorite websites. Their "Guide" was a manually curated directory of links, organized into a hierarchy, unlike the automated, algorithm-driven search engines that would follow. It was a digital filing cabinet, not a grand vision for organizing the world's information. The project started as a way to manage their fantasy basketball league stats. Its popularity on the Stanford campus exploded, and soon they renamed it Yahoo!, an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” The company went public in 1996 and, for a time, was the undisputed king of the internet, a sprawling portal for news, email, and shopping—with search as just one feature among many.
The Founders of Google Didn’t Even Like Each Other at First
The partnership that redefined the internet began with mutual annoyance. When Larry Page was considering Stanford for his graduate studies in 1995, Sergey Brin, a student already there, was assigned to give him a tour. By their own accounts, they found each other obnoxious and disagreed on nearly everything during that initial meeting. But their shared intellectual curiosity and academic backgrounds—both were sons of professors—eventually brought them together. Brin was drawn to Page's ambitious doctoral thesis idea: to explore the mathematical properties of the web's link structure. They realized that analyzing how pages linked to each other could provide a much better way to rank search results than simply counting keywords, which was the standard at the time. This concept became PageRank, the foundational algorithm for the search engine they initially nicknamed BackRub.
Google’s First Investor Wrote a Check Before the Company Existed
In August 1998, Page and Brin had a promising technology but no formal company. They secured a meeting with Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. After a brief demo on a friend's porch, Bechtolsheim was so impressed that he was ready to invest on the spot. He told the duo, "Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a check?" He made it out for $100,000 to "Google Inc." The only problem was that "Google Inc." did not yet exist. The check sat in a desk drawer for weeks while Page and Brin scrambled to file the incorporation paperwork and open a bank account. This initial investment was the catalyst that allowed them to officially form the company, move out of their dorm rooms, and set up their first office in Susan Wojcicki’s garage.
