Google was a huge success by the time it went out of beta. I think this was late 1999.
By 2004's IPO Google's success would be considered "the standard by which success will be defined for the next 20 years" type of huge success rather than merely another run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley $100M exit type of huge success.
By what metric was it a huge success in 1999? They had a good product, but most people had never heard of the company. I remember having to explain that it was "kind of like Yahoo, but with good search and none of the other features", and they were always like, "well, good luck with that." (obviously thinking to themselves, "another stupid .com")
I wonder if Google realised before adwords started growing like wildfire that search was such a potentially powerful advertising platform.
I know that other pay per click & search marketing services were around and were reasonably successful, but a lot of that was probably hard to seperate from the bubble. I mean I don't think there were many plumbers advertising on search in 99' & coca cola was never going to work.
If you want to look at a company like Google, at least mention that they're generating $16 billion in revenue a year. Yes, they took 10 years, but look at the power of their brand, all of the applications they've built and gotten into the marketplace, plus all of their revenue. They're also "the best place to work at" (so you know they're doing a lot more than just product development). Google isn't just a search company anymore, and that's not what they've been spending all of their time doing since 1996.
10 years? You better have something extremely impressive if you're given THAT much time.
How did this get so many votes up? Is the HN community getting soft or what? ;) (I can sense the massive downvotes on this response already)
Not gonna down mod you coz you've given thoughts to it.
Yet, your argument is inline with what the article says. It took Google 10 years for them to become a HUGE success. During this 10 years they probably have worked really hard everyday, and they're all brilliant people. For less talented people it probably takes even longer.
I guess your point is if you're just gonna do a declicious-scale success it doesn't take that long. YouTube even just took a year. But look at how much experience they have under their belt before that. It really depends on where you start counting that 10 years.
The article doesn't specify either, though. It's kind of vague.
By 2004's IPO Google's success would be considered "the standard by which success will be defined for the next 20 years" type of huge success rather than merely another run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley $100M exit type of huge success.