Google Is Founded in a Garage

In January 1996, Stanford University computer science doctoral students Larry Page and Sergey Brin started an academic research initiative to improve internet retrieval. Aided by fellow programmer Scott Hassan, who wrote core code translating the concepts into software, Page envisioned assessing the importance of individual pages through the network of external links directing to them. Alongside researchers Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd, Page and Brin published their findings under the name PageRank, a system whose underlying patent was owned by Stanford. The team chose the project moniker Google, a deliberate variation on the mathematical term googol, representing the number one followed by one hundred zeros, to symbolize an ambition to catalog immense quantities of digital documents across the rapidly growing web.

Transitioning the project from an academic experiment into a commercial enterprise required outside capital and separate facilities. In August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, pledged an initial check of $100,000, creating an urgent practical necessity for the partners to formally incorporate so they could deposit and manage the funds. Computer science professor David Cheriton, who had hosted a demonstration of the search engine at his home, also invested. Additional angel capital arrived from Ram Shriram, then an Amazon.com executive, as well as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Setting up operations in a Menlo Park garage owned by their acquaintance Susan Wojcicki, the founders accumulated about $1,000,000 from these early supporters, family, and friends, and hired fellow Stanford graduate student Craig Silverstein as their first official employee.