Motwani was certain Internet companies would jockey to purchase the technology, and soon after, Brin said, the two partners began speaking to various Silicon Valley companies. Yet all passed on possibly acquiring Google. Even new media companies, it appears, were slow to peer over the horizon.
IN 1998, the year Google was incorporated, utopianism radiated from Silicon Valley and across the Web. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of MIT’s Media Lab, published a book, Being Digital, proclaiming that the Web would usher in a new generation “free of many of the old prejudices.... Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.” The Internet promised freedom from subscriptions and rental charges, and from the crass and misleading advertising dominating television. Digital companies giddily extolled their “traffic” and “page views” and “market valuations,” ignoring their sparse revenues and nonex istent profits. “New media” executives marched to conferences attended by “old media” and gleefully insulted them: “You guys don’t get it!” they’d say. “Open up. Share your content. Dump your expensive printing presses. Use the Internet as a promotional platform and your business will grow.” But how to make money? No one knew.
Greed was also in the air, provoked by dreams of untold riches. Business students flocked to Silicon Valley. Optimism was the drug of choice. Page and Brin opened Google’s first office in the living room of the two-bedroom graduate housing unit in Escondido Village that Sergey shared with a roommate. The Google computers and server were stored in the living room of Larry’s graduate residence. Their machines placed a serious strain on the limited electrical supply, and they learned to break into the basement of Larry’s building to reset the circuit breaker. “Fortunately, I had taken up lock picking so I could get us into there,” recalled Brin. He had read a book written for the very purpose: The MIT Guide to Lock Picking.
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