Google: Inception and Evolution

Google managed not only to become a successful wide known company, but also to enter the dictionaries with the verb "to google". But where does "google" come from? It is a play on "googol", word coined by Milton Sirotta, which means the number starting with '1' followed by a hundred of '0'. Google chose this way in order to make their goal clear: to organize seemingly infinite amount of information.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two founders of Google, met at first in 1995 at Stanford University California, when Larry a 24 year old alumnus of the University of Michigan came on a weekend visit. Sergey was part of the group of students assigned to show him around. According to Google lore, they didn't like each other at all at fist and their opposing viewpoints caused many arguments. However, they found common ground in the development of software able to retrieve data from an immense set of information. And this way two years later BackRub was born.

Despite their pleasure of developing new technology, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had little or even no interest in setting up a company of their own. They continued developing BackRub, but also kept eye for a buyer out there. Among their friends was also David Filo, Yahoo! founder, who encouraged them to work further on the project and meet him again when the search engine should be ready. In lack of a buyer, it was the only thing that they could do and therefore they started looking for investors in order to set up a company. Andy Bechtolsheim, one founder of Sun Microsystems, believed in the potential they had, but being pressed by time he skipped the conversation part and he wrote them a check over $100,000. Since "Google Inc." was not founded yet, they had no legal environment for this money. Until this was founded they managed to locate also other investors and collected a total investment of almost $1 million.