“The Google Story” in my words

After listening “The Google story “( audio book about Google Inc), I tempted to write something about it. Here is the summary of Google Inc.

Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, sons of computers scientists met at Stanford University to pursue their PhD in 1995. They chose to work on internet search engine. Search engines at that time (Yahoo, MSN, Khoj, Altavista, etc) were primarily focussed on eMails other e-commerce activities than search. Search was not high on their priority list and considered as secondary, non-earning feature, and thus not much attention paid to betterment of search results. Search pages were cluttered with Advertisements banners, Pop-Ups and other non-relevant information, confusing the user.

Page and Brin, along with Stanford professor Rajeev Motvani developed PAGERANK algorithm to rate the pages. Due to PAGERANK technology, Google provided very accurate search results. Without going deep into the technology, with accurate search result, I mean that when you type CNN in Google search bar, first search result you suppose to get is CNN’s website. Google provided that accuracy by using PAGERANK technology, which other competitive search engines at that time, could not provide.

Second aspect of Google search was that it was totally dedicated to search and no other advertisement banners, news items cluttered the website. Clean white background, with colourful Google logo, with long search bar, attracted users world-wide and Google became instant success. Google duo understood the importance of human desire to search for more information very well and thus designed Google, dedicated for search only.

Page and Brin tried to sell their Pagerank technology to giants as Yahoo, eXcite but no one wanted to buy it since perception at that time was that Search is non-earning feature. Finally silicon valley investor Andy Balcholstim invested $100,000, before even Google Inc was officially born. Google’s increased customer base and popularity drew other valley investors and Google became world no 1 search engine. Google adopted unique way to earn advertisement revenue. No ads were put on home page of Google to keep serenity of home page intact. This was their biggest USP to win user loyalty. Ads were part of search results in similar looking format, in accordance with what user is searching for. F.eks one user types Airline of India, he will get initial results of Ads ( in very similar format), followed by actual search results.  By keeping it simple, Users never felt disrupted by advertisements.

Google is example is how innovation funded by capitalism and turned into commercial product by intelligent marketing strategies. Entire ecosystem is supplementing each other. Stanford University provided atmosphere and infrastructure required to innovate PAGERANK technology and in return got the patent right of the technology. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million. This $336 million will be used to promote further innovations and some of the innovation will eventually turned into commercial products as Google.  Thus this cycle of nurturing innovations will keep moving.

Innovation can’t work in isolation and it has to be fuelled by capital (money). The first funding for Google was from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Looking at Google technology, confidence and characters of their founders, Page & Brin, Andy Bechtolsheim has issued the cheque of $100000, before Google was even incorporated. With Andy’s funding, young innovators have turned into young entrepreneurs. In due course, other venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital have also invested $25 million in the company in 1998.

Google’s public IPO came in 2004.  For five years, Google has spent money to build brand and loyalty worldwide. Important thing is that its’ innovators Brin & Page, have always been in the control and decided the product and marketing strategies for Google. F.eks. Page and Brin had maintained Google homepage will be free of advertisement and till date it has remained so.  They kept innovation and vision of innovators at core and let commercial aspects surrounding it. This kind of confidence in innovation from capitalist world , triggers series of innovation. After launch of search engine, Google team had come with innovative products as  Google Earth, Google Apps, Android, Gmail, eBlogger etc, visualized by innovators and funded by capitalist world. Keeping faith in innovators, has paid back. Google is number one search engine with total revenue of $29 billion and profit of $8.5 billion(as per 2010 data). Google Inc has made everyone associated happy, from Stanford university, to venture capitalist firms, investors, engineers ( as shareholders), users worldwide and finally Page & Brin.

This marriage of innovation and capitalist world has given birth to IT revolutionary products from IBM mainframe servers, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google to latest social media Facebook. These products and their innovators have kept US as IT innovative super power of the world.

I wish that our country develops such ecosystem of innovators and entrepreneurs, so that we also have our own version of Larry Page and Sergey Brin.