[Article published by Michael Watkins for technation on Sep 8th 2008]
US Search giant Google turns 10 years old today.
In just under a decade two college maths geniuses grew an idea into a global monolith turning over US$16.5B a year. However the most poignant thing about the Google story is in the early days, before Google ‘The Search Engine’ even really existed.
Once they had written the original algorithms for the search engine Larry and Sergey actively went around Palo Alto and Menlo Park trying to sell the product to big VC firms and blue-chip companies. They were very quickly laughed out of the room. The big players thought portals like AOL and Yahoo were still the future of the internet and nobody would really have any use for a ‘backlinked’ search engine.
So after some thought, Larry and Sergey pushed ahead and launched the company anyway. The rest as im sure you all know is history.
The Google story re-iterates the point to any IT entrepreneur, Australian or overseas, that no matter how far out your idea is, no matter how often you get laughed out of a room, if you have the perserverance to stick with it, something will happen.
You may create the next pets.com, in which case you’ll have learnt alot from the experience to move forward with.
Or you may just create the next Google, in which case all you need to look at are the digits down the right hand side of this page…
Happy Birthday Google!
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