What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

http://www.quora.com/What-were-the-4-or-5-key-decisions-that-Larry-Page-and-Sergey-Brin-made-in-the-early-days-of-Google

by helwr • 16 years ago

157 50 16 years ago

quora.com

hga• 16 years ago

Wow.

LOTS of useful stuff here. In addition to a lot of the usual stuff, most especially keeping control, there are these not unrelated gems:

"Retaining control over the company proved to be crucial to Google's success. Most of the early company revenues came from enterprise search, and the investors and Eric Schmidt pressured the company to drop consumer facing search and to focus on the enterprise market. However Page and Brin disregarded this advice as they anticipated the growth of a market for online advertisement. At the time this decision was being made, the New York Times was quoting experts as saying "No one will ever make $250 million dollars a year from online advertising." It has also been said that Page and Brin disregarded pressure from investors to copy Yahoo! and diversify Google into a portal site, deciding instead to focus on the core search and advertising market."

We also now understand their particular style of secrecy: avoiding getting crushed by Microsoft back when that was the fear of every high tech company it could possibly compete with.

The comments as of now are also of high quality and some are not to be missed.

Jun8• 16 years ago

Excellent set of answers, this was my first foray into Quora, btw; if other answers are half as good, it's a great resource.

Among other key decisions they got right (and some lucking out), the one thing they got absolutely right is the culture. Not just perks, food, etc. because during the boom almost all cool startups had these (or better), it's much more than that. The culture components ones that I think were most influential were the 20% time and committee decision making (with actual engineers, not suits).

Having the right culture is not sufficient for success, but without it, I think, all most certainly will be lost.

pg3• 16 years ago

The highest ranked answer on that thread, though it contains some interesting details, is way off. Managing VCs well was not what made Google successful-- or what makes any startup successful. The real key decisions were things like realizing search itself was important, at a time when all the other search engines thought it was unsexy, and were trying to get people to start calling them "portals" instead; designing the architecture to work on large numbers of unreliable, cheap computers; understanding how important speed was; making the site uncluttered; deciding to hire only very smart people; etc. That's what made the company valuable, and if it hadn't been valuable it wouldn't have mattered how well they'd avoided dilution.

barrkel• 16 years ago

That, however, conflicts with the alleged desire of VCs and CEO to focus on enterprise search and abandon consumer search. I don't know how true that allegation is, but if it is true, and VCs had a larger slice of the pie, it's possible that that desire would have been followed, hugely reducing Google's value.

mmaunder2• 16 years ago

I think the key point re managing VC's is that they avoided being forced into an early exit and retained control over the product by keeping control of the company.

Most mature investors want two things: The value of their stock to increase and liquidity opportunities (opportunities to realize that value). They want both to happen rather sooner than later due to the time value of money. They also believe that if they have more control they can achieve these first two objectives more effectively.

These investor goals are not always aligned with what's in the best interests of the product or company which is why it is sometimes a good thing for founders to retain control.

pg3• 16 years ago

VCs don't want early exits. They want companies to go public, which Google did pretty much as soon as the IPO market returned. So whatever friction there may have been between Google and their investors, it would not have been about that.

pkaler• 16 years ago

My takeaway was that they managed dilution so that they could guide the product and the company the way they felt was important. Managing VCs well allowed Google to manage the product well.

Interesting thought experiment: Would Zappos have sold to Amazon if they had managed dilution better?

aaronbrethorst• 16 years ago

According to Tony Hsieh's book, no.

paul• 16 years ago

It's also full of inaccuracies. The "interesting details" are largely wrong. Unfortunately it's written in an authoratative style, so people assume it's true and upvote, demonstrating one of the major flaws in vote based systems.

johnfn• 16 years ago

I suppose, before I upvote you, that I should ask you for sources then.

marze• 16 years ago

What do you consider the best available information on google's history?

greenlblue• 16 years ago

Plus, quora is not really living up to it's promise of a high quality question/answer social site. Most questions and answers are as inane as on yahoo answers and the only difference is the more pleasing UI but that wears off pretty quickly.

resdirector2• 16 years ago

Agreed re voting systems.

I believe that a good Q&A site should use "voting" to recursively find smart people who are similar to you and can provide you with good answers....as opposed to showing the most popular/well-written/pithiest answer. "PeopleRank", maybe.

blueberry• 16 years ago

hey paul! why don't you write an answer there, instead of commenting here? the quoran community could benefit too :)

jeb7• 16 years ago

There are really only TWO decisions that google made that made them successful. When something works, people like to go back and look at complicated things and say that those are the reasons it worked. The reason that google beat the others were really very simple and they had to do with the front-end only:

1. They were the simplest to use at the time. All the other search engine things had a lot of frills and pages and ads and so on. Google was just very plain, and as a result, simple

2. By default, they included ALL the words you typed in. Competitors at the time were trying to maximise search results by searching for each word individually, which led to a lot of irrelevant results. Just by including all the words in the query, google had a much better hit rate

All the rest was unimportant. Those two simply front-end decisions made the google search engine loved by the geeky anti-corporate people who ruled the web at the time (slashdot, linux advocates), and they recommended it to everyone who was joining the net. By appealing to the geeks, who then acted as the authority figures to the normals, google was able to take over the search market back then.

It was really not that complicated.

lisper7• 16 years ago

I beg to differ.

First, it is simply not true that Google "included ALL the words you typed in". Google ignored "common" words like conjunctions and certain pronouns for a very long time.

Second, I think it's fair to say that Google's speed and quality of results were significant contributors as well.

Third, Larry's decision to make AdWords ads live immediately was, I think, one of the key factors in drawing users to AdWords.

Fourth, ad syndication through AdSense was a significant contributor to Google's revenues.

I could go on. I think it's nowhere near as simple as you say.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Yup. At a time when everyone else had given up on search, mainly because they thought that was as good as it could possibly get and thus the future was in other "value add" areas such as portals and directories, Google's founders saw a way to do it better. They married multiple revolutionary innovations (page rank, commodity PCs as servers, sharded computation / "datacenter as a system") and combined with a little bit of usability sense they provided higher quality search results which rendered faster and at lower per result costs.

What they did was enter an existing market with a lot of competition and do something that the competition was absolutely incapable of matching without going back to the drawing board (there are a few other companies who do this too, the list is left as an exercise for the reader). They followed it up with new ways of advertising online that made search a money maker.

gruseom• 16 years ago

But that's teasing! Your observation is a shrewd one and now I want to know who you think the others are.

jakevoytko• 16 years ago

The two of you are looking at their success from opposite directions. You're looking Google from day zero and asking, "Why were they successful at all?" The first answer looks at their mammoth success and asks, "How did they avoid becoming a smaller company as they grew?" The answer isn't as simple as the initial design of Google, or how they managed investors. They took hundreds of great small steps in the beginning that made them number one. Cultural ones, such as free food, "don't be evil," and hiring the best people. Technical ones, like BigTable, MapReduce, the Google File System, and their obsessive focus on operations. Business ones, like the terms of their IPO and their managing of VCs. And entrepreneurial ones, like 20% time, acquiring lots of startups, and awarding employee bonuses by product usage. "In the early days" is a fuzzy measure, but these are all decisions that Google has made to continually grow their company in value

HaltingState4• 16 years ago

Paul, I wrote that answer to be concise. I am not trying to write another book on Google. When you build a Google, you can tell me I am wrong.

Everyone I have spoken to that has built a successful company has told me that their ability to manage the long term interests of their company was impaired by losing control of their board of directors.

If Mark Zuckerberg did not have control of his board, the company would have been sold to Yahoo for just under a billion dollars, where Facebook would have died. The Yahoo executives wanted to "Nascar up the site". It would not be a 30 billion dollar dollar company today if the board had been investor controlled.

The reason Friedster failed was that the company was managed from the board of directors by investors which did not use their product. The founders of Friendster were screaming at the board of directors that the website took 40 seconds to load, but the board was more concerned with expanding into new markets and adding features, rather than solving the scalability issues the company was facing. Myspace copied Friendster, solved the scalability issues and dominated until Facebook introduced the feed and notification mechanism and took the college demographic.

If you want to build a long term success like Google, you have to be in a position to ignore your investor's short term desire to improve the company's financials by sacrificing long term growth. The quickest way to increase your margins is to reduce investment in the future.

Most of Google's costs were from their consuming facing search product. Almost all of Google's revenues were from enterprise search. Dropping consumer facing search would have improved Google's financials for sale or IPO. Everyone at the time believed that search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the management team did not have board control, the decisions that would have been forced on the company would had led Google to a different, much grimmer corporate destiny.

The management team at Google believed strongly in the future of internet search and the growth of online advertising. They saw the potential of using search queries to target advertisements and that search engines were uniquely positioned to monetize lead generation; at a time when search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the company had cut its loss centers and focused on its profit centers, the company would not have been as successful as it is today. The operating autonomy of Google's management team was critical to Google's long term success.

I do not care what Paul Buchheit says. Eric Schmidt has on several occasions discussed the advantages of Google's ownership structure and how it enabled Google to ignore outside influences and focus on the long term success of the company. If Paul Buchheit disagrees with the CEO of Google about the importance of Google's ownership structure and the operational autonomy of the management team, then its unfortunate.

wslh• 16 years ago

As a customer I know these key decisions: i) Self managed ads system. Before AdWords it was impossible to buy $ 5 of ads. Even years after AdWords Overture (Yahoo) and AdCenter (Microsoft) couldn't even copy the smooth process (I remember Overture charging me a minimum of $ 15 and their staff changing my keywords) ii) Text Ads instead of banners as a more respected way of advertising.

dennisgorelik• 16 years ago

It was surprising to learn that Larry Page's brother already had successful startup experience.

ruang• 16 years ago

Provides a good reason to downplay having a fancy interface - avoid tipping off the competition.

smakz• 16 years ago

Lots of entrepreneurial navel gazing going on both in the linked site and in these comments. Everybody has their own theory about the reasons x y z why company a b c is successful, be it Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The problem is every opinion is partially correct, no one can disprove anything, and there is no right answer.

The stories of successful companies are inspirational to some degree, but as a way to vicariously learn how to be successful they fall woefully short of the mark.

The best thing for entrepreneurs to do, is simply to make something happen. Build something people want, and if you fail, learn what you can and try again.

You never know and can't know which decisions are the ones that matter, so forge ahead.

HaltingState4• 16 years ago

God bless you.

This is the most reasonable thing I have seen said here.

caffeine• 16 years ago

I think none of the answers in that summary really say it. Google won (in the beginning) because:

  1. It *just* searches. Really well.
  2. Ad auctions.

That's basically it.

It's the same way Starbucks won in the beginning:

  1. *Just* coffee. Tasty coffee.  
  2. Charge for it.

Or Apple:

  1. *Just* the user experience.  A great one.
  2. Charge for it.

(Google, Apple, and Starbucks have now all diversified widely, with mixed results).

samd• 16 years ago

There are many factors that lead to Google's success, but I know what made me switch to Google back in its early days. It was faster (probably because it was sparse), it got good results, and I felt cool for using it (maybe because it was the underdog, or maybe because it had a "for geeks, by geeks" feel to it).

known• 16 years ago

Nobody was really serious about web search prior to Page & Brin.

What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

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