Brin was athletic but uninterested in team sports; he lost himself instead in gymnastics, swimming, Rollerblading, and biking. Still, Brin was more outgoing than many self-described geeks and enjoyed playing practical jokes. He also took on extra projects that aroused his interest; a typical project was the numbering system for the rooms in the Computer Science Building (donated by Bill Gates, who would become a nemesis). In the building, each room was identified with a four-digit code, which Brin felt did not convey the most useful information to the building’s tenants. “We were offended at having four-digit numbers when you don’t have ten thousand rooms,” he said. Along with computer science professor Vaughan Pratt, he set out to devise a better system, one that would enable someone leaving a given room to calculate the distance to his destination. “We came up with a sensible three-digit numbering system. It was quite elegant. Most buildings are numbered in a really stupid way. The architect or somebody sits down with the blueprint and they collate across and they number things. It looks great to them when they are looking at the blueprint. When you’re actually walking around, it makes no sense at all. The Gates building is fairly simple. I just had the numbers roll around the building. Even numbers were exterior, odd numbers were interior.... The second digit told you how far around the building you had to go. It was very intuitive, if I may say so myself.”
THE SERGEY BRIN WHO was obsessed with efficiency would find a soul mate in Larry Page. Larry was born in Lansing, Michigan, where his father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. His mother, Gloria Page, had a master’s degree in computer science; she taught at the university before becoming a database consultant. With Larry and his older brother, Carl, the Pages lived comfortably in a middle-class neighborhood. By age seven, Larry was proficient on the Exidy Sorcerer computer his dad had brought home, and this ignited his interest in technology, as did the technical magazines and electrical engineering assignments his father also brought home, and his brother Carl’s skill at taking things apart. Larry’s family, like Sergey‘s, welcomed argumentative challenges. The Pages were readers, and Larry fondly remembers vacations to Oregon when they’d take an empty suitcase to fill it with books from the renowned Powell’s Books, in Portland. Unlike Sergey, however, he was conspicuously quiet, and had a bad case of acne. He was a loner, someone who as an adult friends would describe as shy and strangers would describe as asocial. He chose not to follow his mother’s faith, Judaism, but like his father chose not to embrace a religion. Perhaps this was but one reflection of an unsettled home; his parents divorced when he was eight, and his father married a colleague at Michigan State. Carl, nine years older, left home after high school to get a computer science degree. He later was a founder of
eGroups.com
, an Internet company sold to Yahoo in 2000 for about four hundred million dollars.
Just as Sergey was fascinated by Richard Feynman, Larry was inspired at age twelve by a biography of Nikola Tesla, whose pioneering work led to the development of electricity, power grids, X-rays, and wireless communication. Tesla was an extraordinary but unsung scientist, an Edison without the fame or wealth and who, despite his discoveries, died bitter and destitute. Page told me he learned from Tesla that “you can invent the world’s greatest things, but if you just invent them it doesn’t accomplish that much.... I found it very sad. You can imagine if he were slightly more skilled in business, or with people, he’d have gotten a lot more done.” Brilliant ideas alone would not suffice. Timing and follow-through, and raising resources, really mattered.
“I realized I wanted to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world,” Page once said. He became convinced that in order to effect scientific change he needed to start a business. Inventing things, he once said, “wasn’t any good; you really had to get them out into the world and have people use them to have any effect. So probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.” When he thought about the kind of company he wanted, Larry told me, he thought of his grandfather, an assembly-line worker in the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, who during sit-down strikes fearfully carried a heavy iron pipe wrapped in leather as protection from what he described as strike-breaking “goons.” Happy employees, Larry came to believe, are more productive.
The rival for Larry’s attention was music. He had begun playing the saxophone as a child, and he played with considerable skill. After finishing his first year at East Lansing High School, Larry was among the talented musicians chosen to attend summer sessions at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan. But the lure of engineering soon triumphed over music. Like his father, mother, and brother, Larry enrolled at the University of Michigan. He didn’t have much choice. “My dad actually said to me when I was deciding what school to go to, ‘We’ll pay for any school you want to go to—as long as it’s Michigan,”’ he once said.
With his short dark hair and stark black eyebrows and 5 o‘clock shadow, he looked like Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, but his high-pitched voice made him sound like Kermit the Frog. He remained an introvert while studying engineering at the university. Nevertheless, he imagined that one day he might start a company, and insisted on taking business courses. He also stood out; a brilliant student, he served as president of Eta Kappa Nu, a national honor society for electrical and computer engineering students. Preoccupied with finding more efficient ways to do things, he led a still nascent effort to build a monorail that would replace forty buses to connect the North and the Central Campus. He attended a leadership training program at the university, where he encountered a slogan he would often repeat as an adult: “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”
For his graduate studies, he had his heart set on Stanford, a university where even the names of the buildings attest to the men whose careers were spawned there: William R. Hewlett, David Packard, Jerry Yang, James Clark. Yet for all of his ambition and achievements, he feared he was not up to the task. “I kept complaining to my friends that I was going to get sent home on the bus,” he once told Michigan’s alumni magazine. “It didn’t quite happen that way.”
THE STANFORD CAMPUS, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, is spread over eight thousand acres. Like the Google campus that Page and Brin would one day build, Stanford offers free bus service, plentiful food, a bucolic setting, and shared spaces where students can collaborate. By the time Larry arrived in 1995, Sergey had been there two years; he was on the orientation team that welcomed Larry to campus. Sergey, as was his wont, immediately began needling Larry with questions. “We argued a lot,” recalled Brin, mostly about local zoning and city planning. The field didn’t particularly interest Brin, but arguing did. “We ended up talking a lot.” The other students were content to tour San Francisco; Larry and Sergey were curious about other things. Even today, their idea of a relaxing time is to attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show and ask questions about the cool new technologies on display, or quiz astronauts about space flight.
Larry found an academic mentor in Terry A. Winograd, a computer science professor who had won a National Science Foundation grant to explore the future of online information. Larry bolted upright one night from a dream, he said many years later when describing how he suddenly had a vision for search. “I was thinking: What if we could download the whole Web, and just keep the links.... I grabbed a pen and started writing!” He told Professor Winograd, “It would take a couple of weeks to download the Web.” Winograd nodded, he said, “fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me.” Larry downloaded the entire link structure of the Web, not quite knowing what he’d do with it. He realized that links weren’t organic; they were the result of conscious effort. In a sense, users were voting for the best links when they chose to visit a site, or when they included a link on their own site. He had a bold idea to craft a different kind of search engine that would use these links to catalogue not just an island of the Web but the entire ocean.
His new friend Sergey was intrigued. He had been working with computer science professor Rajeev Motwani on data mining for the Web, still a nascent field in which one had to collect links, print them out, and study the printout to derive answers. The audacity of Larry’s effort appealed to him. The math problems—how to count not just the original page links but the links affixed to the links—were the kind of challenge he tackled with gusto. “It was,” Brin said, understatedly, “an interesting source of data.” Sergey signed on, and the two became inseparable; when speaking of them, colleagues began to roll their names together, LarryandSergey.
The two were working at the dawn of the digital age. In 1993, two years before Brin and Page met, a mere fifteen million people in fifty countries used the Internet, and there were just over one hundred Web sites. The Mosaic browser had just been introduced, and Linus Torvalds empowered a community of software hackers to produce the open-source operating system called Linux. But the digital world was moving at breakneck speed, with the Internet doubling in size every year. In 1995, just two years later, Yahoo was born, and its major online competitor, AOL, had nearly five million subscribers; the Mosaic browser had been renamed Netscape Navigator the prior year, and did for the Internet what Lewis and Clark did to open the West.
Mighty Microsoft was late to spot the menace Netscape and the Internet posed to its packaged software business. Microsoft’s misreading of the Internet threat is conveyed in a sixteen-page November 15, 1994, memo to Bill Gates from Myhrvold deriding the “hype” surrounding the Internet, and asserting—just as dismissively as Sumner Redstone was that same year in his speech to the National Press Club—that it was just a distribution platform dominated by “hobbyists.” Although Myhrvold presciently warned of the advent of a Web browser, Microsoft was slow to comprehend the impact of the Netscape browser, which liberated consumers from behind the walls AOL and other portals erected, allowing them to surf the Web. When Microsoft finally reacted, it was not tentative. Bill Gates galvanized his troops with a May 1995 memo, “The Internet Tidal Wave,” warning of this disruptive technology.
The year 1995 was also when a Morgan Stanley analyst named Mary Meeker teamed up with a fellow analyst, Chris DePuy, to author
The Internet Report,
a thick volume that heralded a brave new world. “In this report,” they wrote on page one, “we attempt to describe what may be one of the hottest new markets to develop in years—the growth of PC-based communications and the Internet.” They said the “market for Internet-related products and services appears to be growing” faster than such early media start-ups as printing, telephones, movies, radio, recorded music, television. With a multiplying base of about 150 million PC users, they predicted e-mail “should become pervasive,” and the Internet would serve as “an information distribution vehicle” for companies, slashing costs, birthing new competitors—“the next Microsofts, Ciscos, Oracles, and Compaqs....”
The report was viral. The press heralded it. Companies downloaded more than a hundred thousand copies from Morgan Stanley’s Web site. HarperCollins published it as a book. Within days, Meeker received an e-mail from someone who lived at Three Lighthouse Road in New Zealand—to thank her. “He had a dial-up Web connection and he was able to connect to me from a remote location,” she recalled. “This was the power of the Internet. That was a magical moment, for it represented what the report was about.”
Barron’s
would dub Meeker “Queen of the Internet.” Wireless communications were exploding, and that year Americans spent twenty-two billion dollars on wireless services, as telephone companies and others vied to buy spectrum space that would speed the digital revolution.
Also that year, Nathan Myhrvold wrote a memo to Bill Gates in which he drew a distinction between incremental changes (like CD-ROMs or computers that double in speed every year) and “revolutionary” sea changes. He predicted computers that would be connected to networks, opening markets for e-commerce, information services, and video on demand; a “shift from a products business to a service business” that will allow services to be downloaded rather than sold in packages, opening the possibility that software companies like Microsoft would be able to charge per transaction; and new multimedia platforms that would permit the transmission of CD- quality audio and crisp video pictures. He also predicted there would be a radical change as we “move to an intelligent operating system,” an intelligent agent or navigator that would free consumers to locate what they want on their PC or the Web.
It was at places like Stanford and in classes like Terry Winograd’s that these systems might be designed. To tug his computer science students down from their theoretical heights and ground them in a sense of “how things work and an understanding of the user,” Winograd assigned them to read Donald A. Norman’s
The Design of Everyday Things.
The thesis of Norman’s book is that those who design things—from video recorders to computers to impossible-to-open plastic packages—typically don’t design from the vantage point of consumers. Thus they make products that are overly complicated and confusing. This, he wrote, is “the paradox of technology: added functionality generally comes along at the price of added complexity.”
This idea became an obsession of Larry’s. Years later, he called it a “seminal” book, and remembered being amazed when he first read it “that people are so focused on outside things and are not focused on the functionality of things.” (It still drives him mad to stay in a hotel and not be able to figure out how to turn the lights off “in less than three minutes.”) The book, he said, strengthened the attitude he brought to designing the Google search engine, which was the opposite approach from existing search engines like Alta Vista. If you did a search for
university
on Alta Vista, it heaved at you every text that contained the word university, without ranking value or assessing whether people were actually using the links. Doing the same search, Google relied on the collective intelligence of its users and returned with the top ten universities. Thinking that “your customer or users are always right, and your goal is to build systems that work for them in a natural way, is a good attitude to have,” Page said. “You can replace the system. You can’t replace the user.”