Page and Brin had definite ideas and were not easily swayed. They “thought it was sleazy,” Motwani said, to allow Web sites to pay to appear near the top of searches, as other search engines permitted. They were determined to build a computer system that would never lack capacity, as the one at Stanford sometimes did. To build user trust they wanted a simple, functional home page without advertising or pictures; they wanted to serve users by getting them off the Google site as quickly as possible and on to their destination. Page and Brin wouldn’t spend a penny to market Google. Anyway, they didn’t have a penny; they had just about maxed out their three credit cards. They believed in word-of-mouth advertising: they had the best search engine, and they were sure word would spread.
Their first employee, Craig Silverstein, joined them in Sergey’s living room in 1998. Silverstein, who today is the company’s director of technology, had the foresight, he laughs, to “negotiate the lowest salary. Instead I said, ‘I’ll take stock.’” It was phantom stock, and what the founders needed was real capital. That winter, a Stanford computer science professor, Jeffrey Ullman, introduced them to Ram Shriram, a well-connected angel investor in the Valley. After making his fortune at Netscape Communications, Shriram had recently launched Junglee.com, an online product search site. Larry and Sergey instinctively liked and felt comfortable with the Indian-born Shriram, an affable, unpompous man who asks pointed questions with the finesse of a politician. They wanted to demonstrate their search engine and Shriram suggested “a blind test” in which he picked a keyword and searched it on Google and three other search engines. Shriram was impressed with the speed and relevance of the results. But he told them, “I’m not sure there is room for another search engine.” He offered to introduce them to InfoSeek, Yahoo, and Excite, and suggested they sell the technology. Larry and Sergey were still ambivalent; they wanted to build a great search engine themselves. But months later, in May, Shriram remembers, they called again and said they had completed the meetings he recommended. He assumed they had been rejected, but reluctantly agreed to meet.
Larry and Sergey drove to Junglee’s offices in Sunnyvale and described each of their visits, the most interesting of which was with the founders of Yahoo, Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yahoo was a thriving company that attracted visitors with a broad menu of content encompassing finance, news, and other services. Yang and Filo, they reported, were impressed with their search engine. Very impressed, actually; their concern was that it was too good. Yahoo was a public company, and the more relevant the results of a search were, the fewer page views users would experience before leaving Yahoo. Instead of ten pages, they might see just a couple, and that would deflate the number of page views Yahoo sold advertisers.
“That was for me the aha moment,” said Shriram. “For the first time, I saw this as something disruptive.” Companies like Yahoo and Excite were more interested in being portals than in improving search, leaving an opening for Larry and Sergey. They were still piggybacking on the Stanford system, and they told Shriram that their search engine consumed so much computer capacity that the university wanted them to stop. They needed money.
Shriram offered to make an initial investment and help them incorporate. He also helped them work out a licensing agreement with Stanford so the university would benefit if their two graduate students were successful. On September 7, 1998, the day Google officially incorporated, he wrote out a check for just over $250,000, one of four of this size the founders received. The first was signed by Sun Microsystems cofounder and then Cisco executive Andy Bechtolsheim, who wrote his in August. He had been introduced to Page and Brin by Stanford computer science professor David Cheriton, who became the third initial investor. At the time, Shriram was in the process of selling Junglee to Amazon.com, and in August would start spending most of the week in Seattle as vice president, business development, at Amazon. This link produced the secret fourth investor, Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos. One day Bezos asked Shriram what was interesting in the Valley. When he touted Google, Bezos asked Shriram to arrange a meeting with Larry and Sergey. “I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos recalled; he wrote his check in November. His enthusiasm was ignited less by the idea, and “certainly not by the business plan. There was no business plan. They had a vision. It was a customer-focused point of view.” In September, Shriram was asked to join Page and Brin as one of three Google directors, a seat he continues to hold on a board that now consists of ten members.
For $1,700 a month, the just-formed company sublet new office space: the two-car Menlo Park garage and two downstairs spare rooms of an 1,800-square-foot house in Menlo Park. The owners were friends: Susan Wojcicki, an engineer at Intel, and her husband Dennis Troper, a product manager at a tech company. The newly constituted Google had found its way to them because Sergey had dated Susan’s roommate at Stanford Business School. The house was not located in the upscale sections of Menlo Park, near the Sand Hill Road offices made famous by the venture capitalists whose offices are there, or in nearby Atherton, where many of these venture capitalists live and in 2008 an acre of land could sell for $3 million. Rather, it was on a dreary flag lot at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue.
A concrete driveway led up to the garage, where a whiteboard had been attached with the legend, “Google Worldwide Headquarters.” Inside were three tables, three chairs, a dirty turquoise shag carpet, a tiny refrigerator, an old washer and dryer, and a Ping-Pong table that was kept folded because there wasn’t space to leave it open. They kept the garage door open for ventilation, and used a bathroom on the first floor of the house. Their desks were old pine doors that straddled sawhorses. On Monday mornings, Shriram met with Page and Brin in the cramped bedroom they used as an office, before flying to Amazon for the week. Days, nights, and weekends, Page and Brin and Silverstein lived and worked there, often leaving well after midnight in Silverstein’s ancient Porsche. “He’d start it and it would backfire five times-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat,” Brin said. “It sounded like a machine gun going off. We started pushing his car out onto the street before we’d start it.”
Although it was still in beta testing in the early fall of 1998, Google was getting ten thousand search queries daily. “I was really getting excited about Google,” said Shriram. The founders were getting excited too. “Larry said, ‘We’ll be at the doorstep of information,’” Susan Wojcicki recalled. Brin told her the company “was going to be worth billions of dollars.” That was also what they told visitors from search and portal companies who came to Wojcicki’s living room to discuss the possibility of acquiring Google. Even though the founders had no interest in selling, Wojcicki recalls that they’d propose an outrageous price, knowing it would deflect suitors. They also used the house for their first press interview, with a correspondent from the German magazine Stern, in which they displayed a combination of grandiosity and zeal. Search really “does have a potential to really change things forever,” Brin said. It can “play a really important role in people’s lives, determining what information they get to look at,” said Page, adding, “and that’s an important thing to do for the world.” Although Google had scant income, Page and Brin believed that if they built Google, people would come.