The Lost Google Tapes
This article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008. The “Lost Google Tapes” feature interviews with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were recorded in January of 2000. Scroll down this page to listen to them.
Interview With Sergey Brin – Part 1
The Story Behind The Lost Google Tapes
by John F. Ince
(John F. Ince is a former reporter at Fortune Magazine and Upside Magazine and today is Founder and Chief Podcaster of PodVentureZone.com)
When I contacted Upside Magazine in late 1999 about writing freelance articles, my first assignment was to write a story about an obscure search engine with a weird name based in Mountainview. At that time, few people beyond the Stanford campus or tech community had ever heard of this fledgling startup. Until then, Google had paid virtually nothing for advertising, instead relying on word of mouth and articles in print magazines like Upside. So Cindy McCaffrey, then head of Google’s Corporate Communications, was more than happy to block out a two hour slot on the schedule of Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Larry Page came down with the flu, so I first interviewed Sergey Brin alone for about 90 minutes, then a few weeks later, Larry Page. In the interim I spoke with with Google board members and VC funders, Michael Moritz and John Doerr as well as angel investor Andy Bechtolsheim.
Today, of course, any reporter would kill for that kind of opportunity. I caught these two 26 year old entrepreneurs at a time when they were relaxed, uninhibited and more than happy to tell their whole amazing story is crisp detail, without any of the filters that now characterize most companies’ PR efforts. Although Brin and Page were obviously taking a crash course in Entrepreneur 101, it was clear to me that they were very smart, and I figured that, with the guidance of seasoned investors like John Doerr and Michael Moritz, Google had a bright future. So I wrote a positive article and submitted it.
Not so fast. My editor, threw the article back at me and said, “This needs to be completely re-written with a more skeptical eye. I personally know these guys and they don’t know what their doing. They have no business model.”
Rather than give way to my editor’s bluster, I sought to finesse things. “Give me more time and I’ll expand the Google article into a search industry story.” My editor agreed to the compromise and I spent another month interviewing the CEOs of Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Alta Vista and others. This time My editor accepted my draft and the article made it into print, virtually untouched.
Footnote:
About a month after my Google story ran in Upside, Dan Fost of the San Francisco Chronicle, reported an unsuccessful coup d’etat at Upside in his “media bytes column.” Apparently, the Upside editors, including my editor, had tried to oust Editor-in-Chief, Jerry Borrell, but failed. The publisher, David Bunnell, had emphatically backed Borrell. To protect his turf, Borrell promptly fired his entire editorial staff including my editor on the Google story. But the departing editors would not leave without a gesture of defiance. They retaliated by erasing the hard drives of all the computers in the Upside offices. Fortunately, I had all the Google interviews on tapes in my home and have now retrieved them from the proverbial shoe box and converted them into a ten-part podcast series entitled “The Lost Google Tapes” which can be listened to at www.podventurezone.com. Highlights from the tapes can also be listened to in the San Francisco Chronicle podcast at …
Choosing the Name Google
Ince: How did you get the name Google?
Brin: We were thinking about very large numbers … so we came up with the term “Googol” which is the mathematical term for ten to the hundredth [power]. The correct spelling was Googol and I’m not sure that we realized that we had made a spelling error. But that was taken anyway. There was this guy who’d already registered Googol.com, and I tried to buy it from him, but he was fond of it. So we went with Google.
Ince: What other names were considered?
Brin: I think the previous contender to that was called the “Whatbox”, which would have been okay. But then we decided that “Whatbox” sounded like “Wetbox,” which sounded like some kind of a porn site or something, and we decided to stay away from that. Actually the old version of the system was called Backrub.
Ince: What was the origin of Backrub?
Brin: That was because our technology had to do with looking at the link structure of the Web and looking at the backlinks – which pages link to what pages. So Backrub was sort of an immature technology and we turned the idea of looking at backlinks into a search engine. …
Google’s Secret Sauce
Ince: Could you expand on that and put it in terms that the lay person can understand?
Brin: Yes, well the the technology we developed back then, and it’s just one of another of technologies we use today, was called Page Rank. The idea there is that unlike print media or newspaper articles, say Upside Magazine articles, one article may differ from another, but not significantly. I suppose one article may contain some breaking news and another may contains some little item of little significance, but the difference in significance of Web pages is much greater. … They’re not nearly as uniform. One Webpage might be 100 times bigger in size. I’ll give you an example. Back then if you typed, “Bill Clinton” into a search engine, your first result would be this Webpage which says, “Bill Clinton sucks.” and then has a picture. So that’s probably not terribly useful, but the interesting thing is why did the search engine return that? It did it because it was the result that looked most like the query. Your query was Bill Clinton and this page just has one more word than that. So the older search engines were based upon looking for documents that look like your query. … not at all factoring in the fact that this page doesn’t have any content and nobody cares about it. So our approach was to try to address that problem first … and later to combine it with a whole other part of the system that determines what pages are relevant. So Google’s technology combines the relevance along with the Page Rank to produce your search results.
Biting the Bullet
Ince: When did you and Larry first think about turning this technology into a company and why?
Brin: It was in the Summer of 1998. It was mainly because at that point we were having to scrounge around to find resources. Like we had stolen these computers from all over the [Stanford’s Computer Science] department. We’d assembled them all together, but they were haphazard, like a SUN, an IBM AIX computer, a couple PCs. We had our own little computer storage cabinet, we’d made out of LEGO’s. So basically we were scrounging around and we decided, “Hey, there’s a lot of commercial interest here. People will give us a lot of money to solve this problem of search. Why don’t we go and do it commercially?” The resources just weren’t there in the academic environment. So we started the company about August or September of 1998.
Ince: Who did you approach and how did you go about the process of raising capital?
Brin: Well it turns out Stanford is a very convenient place to start companies from because there’s a big history of company building. We worked through the faculty and ended up with angel funding from Andy Bechtolsheim, who was, of course, out of Stanford and David Cheriton, who was Andy’s co-founder at Granite. I don’t know if you remember that company. It was recently bought by Cisco. And then also Ram Shriram, who was the President of Junglee. Anyway these guys were really helpful. They helped us right off the bat.
Ince: Helpful how? You mean they said, “Shall I write out a check?”
Brin: Yeah, actually. That’s what they said. But they were really helpful beyond that also. But yes, we were showing it to him [Andy Bechtolsheim] and he said, “Oh we could go on talking, but why don’t I just write you a check?”
Ince: How much did he write a check for?
Brin: He gave us a check for $100,000.
Ince: This was on your first meeting?
Brin: Yes, and we hadn’t really discussed valuations and stuff like that. He just figured it would pay off, and he was right. We finalized all the details on the round after that.
Ince: What was your understanding as to what his percentage would be?
Brin: There was none. I guess we figured that if we didn’t agree later, that it would be a loan. I think he saw that we had a pretty solid product. He liked us. I think he figured that we would do well, and he just wanted to push us forward.
Ince: When Andy said to you guys, “Why don’t I just write you a check?” Did you two guys look at each other and go “Wow.”
Page: Yeah, it was pretty unreal. It was like, wow, maybe we really should start a company now. The check sat in my desktop drawer for a month. I was afraid I’d lose it. But until it really happened… until then it had sort of been this intermediate state. Things hadn’t really happened yet. But when he wrote the check… well it certainly does speed things up.
Ince: It’s very interesting to get your perspective on this, because from Andy’s perspective one of the things that he commented on was how sure you and Sergey seemed about how this thing would work.
Page: Yes, well … we had spent a lot of time scoping out the industry. We had already talked with Dave Filo, Jerry Yang [co-founders of Yahoo], George Bell [CEO of Excite] and all these people in the industry and we had a really good feel for what was going on.
Ince: Did you have any trouble getting to see these people?
Page: I won’t say that it was like easy. But being at Stanford and having a product that was really good… I mean Backrub worked really well. It was much better than anything else. … and so we would show them and say “Hey we’ve got this great thing. It works better than anything out there. What do we do?”
Getting In Bed With Stanford University
Ince: Stanford University is an investor in Google. How did that develop?
Page: That’s right. Our original technology is licensed from Stanford. In return for that Stanford has a small amount of equity in the company. And so we’re basically making royalty payments to them.
Ince: So they didn’t make a cash investment in Google?
Page: No, and it’s not that easy to get them to take equity. They usually take equity only when they think a company is going to be successful.
Ince: How much equity does Stanford have in Google?
Page: It’s very small, but we’re certainly happy to have them as an investor.
Stacking the Board
Ince: John Doerr and Michael Moritz are arguably the two most successful venture capitalists in the world. How did you manage to get both on your board?
Page: The interesting tidbit there is that we were talking with Andy [Bechtolsheim] about the [composition of the] board, and we said, “What if we could get both John and Mike on the board?” Andy said, “That would be great, but you have a zero percent probability of that.”
Ince: Had it ever happened before?
Page: No, … So Sergey said, “That sound pretty exciting. Let’s try to do that.”
Ince: So what did you do to actualize that?
Page: We just talked to them and said, “Hey, why don’t you guys both come in?
Ince: And what were their reactions?
Page: They actually really liked the idea, for many of the same reasons we did. They felt it would make the company very notable. It gave us close ties with everybody in the industry, but not such close ties that we were perceived as being aligned with any one of them in particular. So strategically they thought it was an excellent thing.
Ince: How do they interact with each other at board meetings?
Page: Very well. They both have a lot of opinions. But they actually tend to agree on many things and they have a lot of respect for each other.
Not Competing With The Competition
Ince: Do you see yourself as competitor of Yahoo!?
Brin: No.
Ince: No?
Brin: Well not any more than we’re a competitor for say Upside Magazine…. to the extent that people read things on our Websites.
Ince: What do you think of Ask Jeeves?
Brin: Actually I think it’s kind of cool. … particularly in the customer service aspects they’re able to take a limited domain and by doing a lot of handwork make it easy to get answers to people’s questions. I think that’s very useful. In the broad application where they’ve applied it to the entire Web, it obviously has a lot of holes. I don’t know if you’ve tried to use it. You can’t ask it very many things. It’s great when it has the information you want. but it’s a little bit limited. On the other hand with the limited domains, it’s a great tool.
Searching for “Sex”
Brin: There are a lot of tricks you can imagine that people try to try to link pages together and get higher search rankings, but those things don’t work. Here I can show you an example… take the query, “Sex” The terms “Sex” is interesting because that’s the term where there’s the biggest effort to fake search engines, but getting their site to the top of the list. Most search engines will pick the responses by hand. But as you can see this [results page] was done completely automatically and they’re aren’t any porn sites here. Every now and then we’ll have a couple of porn sites pop up, but for the most part this is … you know … safer sex … relationships … sex and romance and things like that. The point is that to try to get your page up higher in the search rankings, there could be tricks that you would play… You use this word more often, you create links here … the porn sites try very very hard… You can’t imagine the lengths they go. The fact that none of these sites show up … and that we’re not doing any filtering here, I think demonstrates that the technology. if not spam proof, is highly spam resistant.
The Evolution of Search
Ince: Where is search going?
Brin: If we look at the evolution of search from say … ten years ago, you probably would have gone to the library and looked through the catalogues, something like that. Maybe you would have used some online sources to give you listing of books you could get at the library. And it would have taken you a long time…. maybe the better part of a day. Now if you have an information need, you just type it in and swoosh…. one second later you have search results. All told from the process of booting your computer to firing up you Web browser to looking through the information takes maybe 15 minutes to a half an hour. Where I see search going is that I see search becoming much more ubiquitous, where every time you go anywhere …. well, first let me back up. … You probably get a lot of emails about companies. It would be nice to have their home pages automatically popping up without you having to do anything. So that’s already incorporating search much more into your everyday work pattern. And you’re able to get information that you didn’t even know to look for.
The Future of Google
Ince: Do you see Google providing those sort of services?
Brin: Yes, definitely, and even further down the line, I see people wanting to get information very quickly from your cellphone or your PDA wherever you are, and you want to be made aware of information that’s relevant to whatever you’re doing without even asking.
Ince: So who might Google be partnering with in this process?
Brin: That’s interesting. I think there several different kinds of companies. Certainly as the wireless market develops we’d like to have partnerships there.
Ince: Who have you been talking to there?
Brin: I don’t know if we’ve publicly announced. Anyway there’s already been one wireless company with whom we’ve forged a partnership. … a small partnership… and we’re talking to more. Right now, though the market is very immature, and I haven’t yet seen a device that I think works well. They’ve all been pretty crude and I don’t think they’ll be successful. But definitely the potential is there and I think someone will introduce a good wireless device.
Ince: Capable of search?
Brin: Yes, capable of search.
Ince: What else do you see Google doing?
Brin: Other things …. we try to offer things that are not just search, but navigation aids. .. like Google Scout… which gives you related pages to the search result. And I certainly see more incorporation of the everyday browsing process as a navigation aid. Basically we want to stay focused on what we do well which is getting people to more useful information. We don’t want to be building out lots of services, which is what other companies do well, like Yahoo!.
Ince: Will you [Google] be anything besides a search engine?
Brin: No, with the exception of the kinds of things I mentioned, like navigation aids and things like that. Although we’re open to develop across different axis of search engines or portals.
The Most Difficult Challenges and Most Exciting Moments
Ince: What’s been the most difficult part and the most exciting or liberating part of your transition from a Ph.D. candidate to entrepreneur?
Brin: Probably the most difficult part has been learning to deal with organizational challenges. We have over 70 people right now. When it was just a few people it was fine. They’re weren’t any really complicated issues. Now we have a much more complicated yeast. It’s not really clear how to keep everybody productive and focused… things like that. That’s been somewhat of a learning process. Also in our business dealings we were used to getting things done pretty quickly. … but if you want to form a partnership with somebody, that’s another matter. That takes a lot of time. You have to meet with them several times. You have to gage whether you want to do business with these people. You have to spend time getting to know each other, then you have negotiation. So that’s been somewhat of a challenge. The most exciting part has been working with the great people we’ve been able to hire. There’s just a great talent pool here. I’m just amazed at how we’re able to develop this product and take it to the world.
