The Google Founders

They came from opposite ends of the earth to create a billion dollar company that has revolutionized the world. California-based Google Inc. has not only become the Internet’s most popular search engine with revenues of over $21 billion yearly, but the company has also undoubtedly entered the mainstream culture; the verb “to google” was recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

For the past decade, Google has been helping people navigate the Internet and find precisely what they were looking for. From providing people with life-saving information to helping breakdown global barriers, Google’s impact on the world is undeniable.

How did two university dropouts transform their simple idea into a billion dollar company?

“We have a mantra: don’t be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.

Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.If you have a product that’s really gaining a lot of usage, then it’s probably a good idea.

I worry, but I’ve worried all along. I worried as we got bigger and there were new pressures on the company. It wasn’t so long ago that we were all on one floor. Then we moved to a new, larger office building and were on two floors. We added salespeople. Each change was huge and happened over a very short period of time. I learned you have to pay a lot of attention to any company that’s changing rapidly. When we had about 50 people, we initiated weekly TGIF meetings on Friday afternoons so everyone would know what had happened during the week. But those meetings have broken down because we now have too many people, about 1,000, including many who work in different time zones. We try to have a summation of the week’s work via e-mail, but it’s not the same. When you grow, you continually have to invent new processes. We’ve done a pretty good job keeping up, but it’s an ongoing challenge.

We think a lot about how to maintain our culture and the fun elements. I don’t know if other companies care as much about those things as we do. We spent a lot of time getting our offices right. We think it’s important to have a high density of people. People are packed together everywhere. We all share offices. We like this set of buildings because it’s more like a densely packed university campus than a typical suburban office park.

But you don’t need a huge company, just a computer and a part-time person. So you don’t need to have a 100-person company to develop that idea. You can do it in your spare time, you can really work on ideas and see if they take off — rather than trying to raise tons of money, millions of dollars for an idea that may or may not work. And once you have the product and people are using it, it’s very easy to raise investment. ”