Book Review: The Google Story
This is going to be the first in what will be many reviews of tech-oriented books that I read. I love to read. I stopped reading for awhile because of my fascination with playing World of Warcraft. I really love that game, but have grown tired of playing it. So I am taking a break from gaming and am getting back to reading.
So, I present to you:
The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed
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Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Delacorte Press (2005)
ISBN-10: 055380457X
This book was written in late 2005 and start at the very beginning of the story. The time is Spring 1995, the place is Stanford University. Larry Page was in orientation at Stanford and was in a group that was being led by Sergey Brin, who was two years into his Stanford stay. The two immediately hit it off and began to debate each other constantly.
And their the most powerful company to date was born, ironically in a Stanford building named after the leader of the company that has vowed to destroy Google…Microsoft’s (then)CEO Bill Gates, in the William Gates Computer Science building. What began as a project for one of Page’s classes in data mining with another student sucked Brin in and they began to start finding ways to transverse the Internet. Page was using AltaVista for a lot of his searches since it was the best engine of the day (early 1996). He noticed that the results contained links that, when clicked, would take him to the website with that information. Today, we think “DUH…that is how search works,” but eleven years ago, that was cutting edge technology.
Watching how these two guys came together and worked through all mathematics to aggregate the results to show you what you are searching for is really amazing. Of course, there is no concrete proof of how Google works. But they talk about how they talked to a former VP of Cisco to secure the first dollars to get Google of the ground, how they decided early on that all of the Google servers are built with off the shelf parts, and how they secured a quarter of a million dollars [combined] from not one, but two of the most powerful venture capitalist [VC] firms in Silicon Valley.
From this book, you see just how smart Brin and Page really are. They got money from two VCs in Silicon Valley, they orchestrated the Google IPO in a way that Wall Street had never seen before, and they run the company in a way that can only be described as a toy store with all of the employees being the kids. At one time they had an Executive Chef that had outside ties to the Grateful Dead and whose only directive was to provide free, wholesome food to the growing Google clan.
I was very impressed with the access that was granted for this book. It truly shows that Google is a different kind of company with a different mindset. Brin and Page never set out to be rich. They just wanted a better search engine to give better results to save them time while doing research for their Ph.D’s. Well, they got VERY VERY rich, they provided the world with the best search engine on the planet, and, well, Ph.D’s aren’t for everyone.
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