Brin listened, then quickly moved on to his second question: “Have you ever heard of Slashdot?”
Slashdot was a technology news site that encouraged user-generated comments, a pioneer of what came to be known as blogging. Krane smiled and pulled from his pocket a geeky badge of honor: a Palm 7, which permitted a wireless Internet connection to one of his favorite sites, Slashdot.com. “I thought,” said Krane, “I had aced the interview!”
Brin shook hands and left, and Page entered. “He greeted me in a very reserved way. He asked me the equivalent of a tell-me-about-yourself ice-breaker question.” Krane waltzed through his life, his interests, his passion for Google. “I wasn’t getting any kind of signal back from Larry. It was like talking to a stone wall.” He thought, “I’m sinking!”
Desperate, he began to talk about music, and his musical training. He completed maybe three sentences when Page excitedly interrupted, “That’s where I know you!”
Krane was mystified.
“That’s where I know you! I was at Interlochen too, that same summer! And I also played saxophone!” They swapped memories of the three months at Interlochen Arts Camp. “We figured out that we sat next to each other. Larry was in my left ear in the same jazz band. I played tenor sax and he played alto sax. We were both joined by acne, big glasses, and blue corduroy pants and light blue polyester short-sleeved shirts with a big butterfly collar, the Interlochen uniform.” Days later, Krane was hired on as employee number 84. Today he is Google’s director of global communications and public affairs.
As the business took shape, the founders thought more and more about aesthetics. They wanted a home page that was both playful and uncluttered, so they hired a Stanford design teacher named Ruth Kedar. Her instructions, she recalled, were clear: “Google wanted to create a unique logo that would clearly differentiate them from the other search players at the time… These other players were commercial portals first, and search engines second. Google wanted to convey that it was a search provider first and foremost… Google as a brand should repudiate all things corporate, conventional or complacent.” The design was meant “to look almost non-designed, the reading effortless. The colors evoke memories of child play.”
Years later, Page and Brin demonstrated their playful irreverence. It was April 1, and the white space on the Google home page suddenly carried a line under the search box: “A Cool World: Enjoy a rosier future as a Virgle Pioneer.” When the link was opened, an invitation appeared to sign up for an “Adventure of Many Lifetimes.” The invitation read: “Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.” The site described the alleged deprivations, including low broadband rates and physical hardships and potential death. It was an April Fools’ joke.
The home page design, and a few glowing mentions about its search prowess in media like PC Magazine, generated some buzz about Google in the Valley. Ron Conway, the angel investor, recalled a reception attended by Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster, who had become a poster boy for the digital revolution. Brin and Page were unknowns and Conway remembers them approaching Fanning and saying, “What does it feel like to be on the cover of all those magazines?”
“You guys have a really cool search product,” responded Fanning. “You’ll be more famous than I am!”
Danny Sullivan, a former reporter who left newspapers in 1996 to publish a Web newsletter called Search Engine Watch (now called Search Engine Land), and who is the closest approximation to an umpire in the search world, remembers the early buzz about Google. The initial search engines-AltaVista, Highbot, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, GoTo, Yahoo-were more interested in becoming “sticky portals” that trapped users on their sites, which diluted their focus on search. And when they performed a search, they were not impartial, allowing advertisers to buy their way to the top of the search results. Google, by contrast, “was really dedicated to search,” and refused to allow advertisers to distort the “science” of their search results.
Despite their young age-they were twenty-six-and the tight focus of their education, Brin and Page had extraordinary clarity about what search users might want. They rejected the conventional wisdom embraced by AOL and Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN to create portals and try to keep users in their walled garden with an array of content. They believed the right approach was to get users out of Google and to their search destination quickly. They rejected advertisers who wanted to place banner ads alongside search results, because the banners slowed results, were not intrinsic to search, and were a distraction. In the late nineties, when pop-up ads were the dominant way to advertise on the Web, the founders had the Google tool bar block them. They declined to place ads on their most valuable piece of real estate, the uncluttered opening Google page containing the search box.
Brin and Page resisted ads because they shared an allergy then common among Webheads and many folks who attended Burning Man: that advertising was like a rude stranger interrupting a conversation to sell you something you neither wanted nor needed. “These guys were opposed to advertising because they had a purist view of the world,” said Shriram. Like some Burning Man attendees, Page and Brin were-no other word will do-odd. Barry Diller, the CEO of the InterActiveCorp, a diverse collection of such e-commerce sites as Expedia and Ticketmaster, recalled visiting Page and Brin in the early days of Google. As they talked, Diller was disconcerted to see that Page did not lift his head from his PDA device; and Brin arrived late, on Rollerblades. “It’s one thing if you’re in a room with twenty people and someone is using their PDA,” Diller recalled. “I said to Larry, ‘Is this boring?’”
“No. I’m interested. I always do this,” said Page.
“Well, you can’t do this,” said Diller. “Choose.”
“I’ll do this,” said Page matter-of-factly, not lifting his eyes from his handheld device.
“So I talked to Sergey. I left thinking that more than most people they were wildly self-possessed.”
The founders may not have had a clue how to make money at Google, but they were clear that their mission was to build a great search engine and offer this search for free. Susan Wojcicki, the engineer who rented her garage to the founders and became employee number 18 and who later introduced her sister, Anne, to Brin, said the founders “were on a mission to build the best search engine,” and “early on understood that what mattered were users.” Their initial mission statement declared that they aimed “to organize the world’s information and make it universally acceptable.” This mission on its face was not as crassly commercial as Microsoft’s. Bill Gates’s quest was to put “a computer in every home and on every desk.” Each computer sold increased Microsoft’s dominance over the software market for the PC. Google’s missionary zeal, coupled with the fact that its search was free, cloaked its lust to also build a profit-making machine.
Building the machine, however, required capital. Relying mostly on original angel investors Shriram and Bechtolsheim for business advice, the founders decided early on to seek funding from more than one venture capital firm, so as not to rely on a single source of funds, and to assure their independence by selling no more than one-quarter of the company. They set out to recruit two of the most prominent VC firms in the Valley, Kleiner Perkins Caufield amp; Byers, whose senior partner John Doerr was a trained engineer who had helped fund such start-ups as Amazon, Netscape, and AOL, and Sequoia Capital, where Oxford-educated former Time magazine reporter Michael Moritz was a partner and an early backer of Yahoo and PayPal. Doerr remembers the meeting vividly. They met in the conference room next to his glassed office on Sand Hill Road. Page and Brin made a brief PowerPoint presentation to establish the most telling facts: by the end of 1998 they had indexed twenty-six million Web pages and were now doing half a million searches a day. Doerr was impressed. Instead of a long-winded explanation of their mission, Page and Brin made a high-concept pitch consisting of eight words: “We deliver the world’s information in one click.”