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