Two Stanford dropouts-in-waiting file the papers; Google is now a company
By the late summer of 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a search engine ranking the web better than anything else online, but no company to run it. On September 4, 1998, the two Stanford PhD students incorporated Google in Menlo Park, California, turning their research project into a business. They set up shop in a friend's garage, borrowed from an early $100,000 investment, and hired Craig Silverstein as employee number one. The academic prototype known as BackRub now had a name, a bank account, and a mission.
Google's incorporation is a Stanford-to-Silicon-Valley story with no foreign equivalent to borrow from: American research-university funding, West Coast angel capital, and a culture willing to bankroll two grad students on a hunch. The company that emerged now shapes how most Americans find information, advertise businesses, and access the internet itself, and it helped cement Northern California's dominance of the American tech industry for the next quarter century.
QWhy did Andy Bechtolsheim's first Google check almost bounce?
Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, was so convinced by Page and Brin's pitch in August 1998 that he wrote a $100,000 check made out to "Google Inc." on the spot, before that company had any legal existence. Page and Brin had to scramble to incorporate and open a business bank account just so the check wouldn't sit uncashable in a drawer. The urgency of a real check for a fake company is part of why the incorporation happened within weeks.
QWho was Susan Wojcicki to the Google founders, beyond just being the garage's owner?
Susan Wojcicki was a friend of Larry Page and Sergey Brin who rented them her Menlo Park garage as Google's first office in 1998. She later joined Google directly as an early employee and eventually rose to run YouTube after Google acquired it, making her one of the most consequential hires to come out of that same garage arrangement. Her sister Anne Wojcicki also became entangled in Google's story through a later marriage to Brin. A single friend's garage ended up producing both a founding location and a future top executive for the company.
QWhat was Google called before it was Google?
The research project Page and Brin started at Stanford in January 1996, with help from fellow student Scott Hassan, was known as BackRub, named for its trick of analyzing the web's backlinks to rank pages. Professors Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd co-authored the resulting PageRank algorithm with the two students. BackRub was already crawling the web from Stanford's own servers by August 1996, two full years before anyone incorporated a company around it.
