When I interviewed Larry Page and Sergey Brin for their first ever Time magazine story, the then 27-year-old Google founders started talking up a grandiose mission: to organize the world’s information
This was at the turn of the century, when they’d just moved to an office park and could walk unknown on the street. I met them again at Burning Man 2000 when they showed up incognito in body paint at Time‘s RV for a drink; it took me 10 awkward minutes to recognize them
See also: 7 Reasons 2013 Was the Year of Google
Organize all the world’s information? These dorky-looking kids were geniuses of the algorithm, admittedly, but minnows compared to the might of Yahoo, the most popular search engine. Google had no revenue and a business model at which everyone else had failed: Internet advertising. Page and Brin seemed to spend an awful lot of time building printers out of Legos, hacking hardwired screensavers and getting massages. I was rooting for them — they were ridiculously charismatic for geeks my age — but Yahoo was a daunting enough opponent. You want to conquer information itself? Sure, guys. Read more…
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