Biographies of Silicon Valley protagonists

A History of Silicon Valley

This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"

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Larry Page

Larry Page (Michigan, 1973), the son of computer science professors, studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan before enrolling to study computer science at Stanford University (he never graduated). In march 1995 he met Sergey Brin. In august 1996 a prototype of their search engine was running on a Linux server inside the Stanford network. In 1998 Page and Brin launched their search engine, Google. Google ranked webpages according to how "popular" they were on the Web (i.e. how many webpages linked to them). Google went against the trend of providing ever more sophisticated graphical user interfaces: the Google user interface was just text (and very little text). In 1999 Google had eight employees. Their first "angel" investor (before the company even existed) was Andy Bechtolsheim of SUN. Then (in june 1999) they obtained $25 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner-Perkins. In 2000 Yahoo dumped Inktomi and adopted Google's search engine. In june 2000 Google had achieved the feat of indexing one billion pages. In january 2001 Google hired Wayne Rosing, a Silicon Valley veteran who had overseen the Lisa at Apple and Java at SUN. In february Google completed its first acquisition (an archive of the old Usenet, dating back to 1995) to create an extra application (Google Groups). Venture capitalists John Doerr of Kleiner-Perkins and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital became more involved in steering the business of the company, which eventually led to hiring another Silicon Valley veteran, Eric Schmidt (Zilog, Xerox PARC, SUN), as chairman. In 2003 Google had 10,000 servers working nonstop to index the Web (14 times more servers than employees). In 2002 Google acquired Blogger and in 2004 they acquired Keyhole, the source for their application Google Earth. More than a search engine, Google was expanding in all directions, becoming a global knowledge provider. In early 2004 Google handled about 85% of all search requests on the Web. Google's IPO in august 2004 turned Google's founders into billionaires. In 2004 an ever more ambitious Google launched a project to digitize all the books ever printed. In 2004 Google hired German-born natural-language expert Franz-Josef Och, whose machine-translation system at the University of Southern California had been selected by DARPA; and in 2005 Google introduced its own automatic-translation system to translate webpages written in foreign languages. In october 2004 Google acquired Danish-born Australian-based Berkeley alumnus Lars Rasmussen's company Where2 and its mapping software; and in 2005 Google introduced Google Maps. In october 2006 Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. By 2006 Google had indexed more than eight billion pages, coming from the 100 million websites registered on the Web. In 2007 Google started distributing for free Android, a Linux-based open-source operating system for mobile phones that had originally been developed by a Palo Alto stealth start-up named Android and founded by Andy Rubin and others. In february 2007 Google targeted Microsoft's core business when it disclosed a humbler version of cloud computing, Google Docs. In 2007 Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, the New York-based company that dominated "display advertising". Google's strategy became even more aggressive in 2010 when it launched into an acquisition spree. Notably, it purchased BumpTop, the three-dimensional GUI developed since 2006 by University of Toronto's student Anand Agarawala, and Plink, a visual search engine developed by two Oxford University's students, Mark Cummins and James Philbin. In 2007 Google's founders established Google.org, the non-profit arm of Google, to fund greentech start-ups. In 2008 they invested in eSolar, a Pasadena-based manufacturer of solar thermal plants, and in AltaRock Energy, a Sausalito-based firm tapping geothermal energy.

History of Silicon Valley | Biographies | History pages | Editor | Correspondence