Thread by @shreyans512

The year is 1995. The location: Stanford college trip. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are fighting and arguing with each other.

Strangely, this fighting was actually the beginning of the trillion-dollar giant called Google.

This is the incredible story of how Google started👇👇

Nikola Tesla's biography had a huge impact on 12-year-old Larry Page. In spite of so many groundbreaking inventions, Tesla died a poor and unknown man.

Larry realized that just inventing something wasn't enough. The invention should be made into a successful company.

During his 2nd year at Stanford, Larry had an idea in the middle of the night: an algorithm to rank all the webpages available on the internet.

He immediately called his best friend Sergey Brin to talk about this idea.

Sergey was a Russia-born math genius who had come to American at the age of 6. His dream was to work for a company that had "A large office, good pay, and very little work".

Both of them got to work on this idea.

Together, they wrote an algorithm to rank webpages according to their popularity. They called this algorithm "PageRank".

Then they had another idea: why not use PageRank to search webpages instead of ranking webpages?

So, using PageRank, they built a new search engine called...Backrub🤣🤣🤣

At that time, most of the search engines were bad. Really bad. When you searched for something, they produced something stupid and irrelevant.

But because of the magic of PageRank, searching on Backrub produced very relevant and useful results.

Plus, Backrub kept improving: As the internet got bigger, PageRank got better so Backrub got better.

This fact inspired the founders to name their new engine Google, after googol, the math term for 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

They released the first version of Google inside Stanford in August 1996, and it was a hit!

Larry and Sergey were encouraged by Google's popularity, and they added more features like full-text search.

But running a search engine required lots of computing power. And these guys didn't have money to buy so many computers.

So they begged and borrowed computer parts from people, and they assembled a giant computer inside Larry's hostel room and connected it to Stanford's broadband.

Soon, Google got so big that by 1996, it would regularly bring down Stanford's Internet connection. (at that time, Stanford had one of the best internet connections on the planet!)

So these guys got $1 million funding from friends and family and moved from Stanford into a garage

Google was incorporated in 1998—two years after Larry's midnight idea of ranking webpages.

These guys had started to write an algorithm to rank webpages, but they ended up making the best damn search engine ever.

Happy belated birthday to Google👏👏

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The "Google Garage".
This is the garage where Larry and Sergey moved to after leaving Stanford.

The owner of this garage was Susan Wojcicki. Guess what? She's now the CEO of YouTube.

Lesson: A garage can change your life.