[Judgmentality]

> Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally wanted Google to be a pay-to-use service and were against ads. I don't know how they came to their change in business model, but I suspect it was after they hired people that weren't engineers to help.

[adventured]

It occurred after Eric Schmidt took over operational control of Google. He focused in on a rational business model (swiped from GoTo.com [1]), it's specifically why the venture capitalists installed him. Schmidt had both an engineering background and management experience. The story I recall from back then was about John Doerr telling Schmidt to not fuck it up (recounted in a nicer way by Schmidt, below [2]); the advertising runway was pretty simple for Google, given the product they were building under the hood.

Schmidt joined Google in March 2001. For all of 1999 Google only had $220,000 in revenue (founded Sept 1998). Their early, primitive experiments in advertising worked well enough, they brought in $19m in revenue for 2000 (which would increase 300% in 2001, and then 400% in 2002).

[1] 2013: https://slate.com/business/2013/10/googles-big-break-how-bil...

[2] 2005: https://www.gq.com/story/google-larry-sergey

> Schmidt met all of Larry and Sergey's stringent criteria. He had a credible name, a Ph.D. (from Berkeley), and he promised not to push the boys aside or dismantle the quirky culture they'd engendered. "The board members told me, basically, 'Don't screw this thing up!' " Schmidt says. "They said, 'It needs some infrastructure, some growing, but the gem here is very real.'"

[ZephyrBlu]

Wow, that growth is absolutely insane even by startup standards.

Has there been another company since Google that grew so fast? $19mil revenue in 2yrs, then tripling and quadrupling.

[davemel37]

When Groupon pivoted from The Point it grew insanely fast. 2008 - $0 2009 - $15 million 2010 - $313 Million 2011 - $1.6 Billion

Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GRPN/groupon/reven...

[renewiltord]

I believe Uber's revenue grew at that pace.

[marc__1]

Fastest company to reach $100m ARR [1]:

Slack - 3 years Twilio - ~5 years ServiceNow - 6 years Shopify - 7 years

[1] https://www.bvp.com/bvp-nasdaq-emerging-cloud-index

[davemel37]

This list is saas companies. Its missing all consumer brands.

[dublin]

Compaq grew nearly as fast as some of those SaaS companies, and was engaged in design, manufacturing and sales of a complex technology product that actually had to work, not just buggy web software. IIRC, they reached $1B faster than any company ever at the time. SaaS and "sharing" economy (really skimming economy) apps are not sustainable, but then as it turned out, neither was Compaq, after they entered into a stupid mergers...

[wombatmobile]

Nicholas Carr wrote in Los Angeles Review of Books:

Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements. Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors. As one Google executive quoted by Zuboff put it, “Larry [Page] opposed any path that would reveal our technological secrets or stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-ho...

[AlchemistCamp]

> I suspect it was after they hired people that weren't engineers to help

For years, they required that all their hires could program, even those in completely unrelated roles.

[Grustaf]

I suppose this might explain why all google products have terrible UX, to this day. But it's not really an argument against non-technical co-founders. Steve Jobs was non-technical, I think it's safe to assume Woz's Apple would have been less successful.

[haakonhr]

But he definitely had a technical background (working at Atari) and he knew his way around a circuit (compared to people one could classify as non-technical)