The google story

Author : http://www.thegooglestory.com

Article source : http://www.dctorrent.com/showthread.php?p=468637

Just completed reading " The google story" by David Wise. Quite an eyeopener on how Serjey and Larry managed to make their dreams into a $80 billion giant. The journey from the Stanford lab to the gates building to the garage to googleplex is worth a read however, some portion of the book might have been better with a more detailed take. Take the case where Overture sues Google for infringement of its propriety ad selling mechanism. Felt somehow lost as I had no idea who was Overture and why on earth did they not capitalize on their patented solution or the case where the founders had no interest in hiring a CEO but were being forced by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. Somewhere the seriousness and implications of Larry's and Brin's decision on Googles future was not really discussed to extent that would have made a serious reader satisfied. Anyway's heres my 10 point gyan to anyone interested in knowing a bit about Google and its founders.

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1)Google is a mis-spelt word. The original word is Googol which means 1 followed by 100 zeroes.


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2)Larry Page's brother Carl page also sold his internet company during the dot com era for an eye popping $500 million.

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3)Google's ad model was originally developed by a company named Overture ( Now a Yahoo company)

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4)From their original hostel at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were shifted to a newly constructed building named William Gates building.

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5)Though a tech company Google followed the practices of media companies during its IPO. To protect itself from unwanted takeover threats the company issued class A and B types of shares. Valued similarly the two classes of shares differed only in their voting rights. The company also developed an auction based system of allotting its stake to prevent unwanted volatility just after listing.

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6)Google had lost the Amazon Europe ad deal to Yahoo. Larry and Serjey were traveling on their private jet when they got this news. With much persuation the founders arranged a secret meeting with Amazon's CEO. Google raised its bid to such a level that Yahoo was eventually forced to back out of the deal saying that it did not make business sense for the latter.

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7)Google's inhouse chef Charlie Ayers is one of the few chefs in the world who became a millionaire by selling personal Google shares given to him.

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8)Its very rare to find Kleiner Perkins and sequoia capital investing in the same venture. Larry and Sergie played a sleek game pitting the two VC'c against each other resulting in the two firms investing $12.5 million each.

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9)Google has a policy where employees are allowed to spend 20% of their time persuing their interests. Googlenews, Gmail and a host of other applications are a result of employee ideas which originated during this 20% time.

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10)Google has one of the largest hardware infrastructure and computing power in the world. This can be gauged from the fact that the company crawl the entire web and saves it in its computers. When a user searches for something, the google computers searches through the saved pages and throws out relevant results within seconds.

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