Thread by @varun_mathur

It's the summer of '99.

Google is growing rapidly but still has less than 1% share of the daily search market, is not focused on any niche, and is also not getting mentioned in the press. It is growing based on word of mouth alone and raises $25MM.

Pets .com raises $50MM🤷‍♂️

Google originated as "BackRub" in Stanford and in the fall of '96 was generating buzz in the academic research community.

By fall of '98, it had 10k queries/day, and raised $1MM in funding from Bezos and 3 other angel investors.

Salon wrote this then:
salon.com/test/1998/12/2…

In early '99, Google founders tried to sell it to Excite, but were turned down even for $750k.

They had no choice but to continue chipping away at it and moved into an office in March '99.

theguardian.com/technology/201…

June '99 was a key inflection point for Google, when it raised $25MM. With that funding, Larry and Sergey recruited a team of top tier computer scientists. They didn't settle.

By July, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, Google’s unique users surged 88%.

googlepress.blogspot.com/1999/06/google…

This Forbes article by @om in Oct '99 is the earliest mainstream media article I could find about Google.

It was by then doing 4 million search queries per day.

Nobody else (checked WSJ, NYTimes, etc) was writing about Google back then 🤷‍♂️

forbes.com/1999/10/04/fea…

But, as Larry Page said:

"Traffic on our website has increased 50 percent per month since the company’s inception. This increase in unique visitors to the Google site is being fuelled by word of mouth — people with good Google experiences telling other people about Google"

By mid 2000, Google was up to 18MM searches/day, and had an existential issue with its tech. That's where its earlier investment in recruiting top tier people came into play - book "In The Plex".

Network effects: Google grew with the growth of the web.

nytimes.com/2004/08/23/bus…