Funding Google
If you haven’t been able to tell, I LOVE TO LEARN (especially when it is something that I am passionate about). One of the coolest things that I have been studying lately are company histories. For example, I was reading the history of Google, Inc. last night and learned the details of how they initially received funding. And guess what — they received angel funding (this might be common knowledge, but I still think that it’s pretty cool to read). Check this out:
Unable to secure the financial support of the major portal players of the day, cofounders Page and Brin decided to make a go of it on their own. They wrote a business plan, put their graduate studies on hold, and searched for an investor. They first approached Andy Bechtolsheim, founder of Sun Microsystems, and friend of a Stanford faculty member. Impressed with their plans, Bechtolsheim wrote a check to Google Inc. for $100,000. The check, however, preceded the incorporation of the company, which followed in 1998.
There are more than 10,000 company histories to learn from. I’ve already noticed the histories of companies like Exxon Mobile, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and Apple. As you can tell, I still have a lot of reading in front of me!
What’s amazing about Google, was that they are a second mover in their industry, but do search better than any other. They were just two guys in a garage trying to build a better search engine and didn’t even have a business model. They did it so well though, that traffic followed in droves, and they eventually slapped on advertising next to search results to make billions.
You don’t have to “invent the next big thing” to be the next big thing. Simply do something extremely well that will service lots of people, and the business model will take care of itself.
Except . . .
Better search was their business model. If something really is better, that is the model on which the money will flow.
I also don’t think Google necessarily provided better search. They just focused on search and made it simple. Yahoo! was search, but it was also a ton of other things. Ask Jeeves was search, but even Jeeves was bogged down with logos and color and other stuff on the main page.
Google was great because it was just search. It’s still the same today for the masses. You have a logo that says Google and a search bar. So, when it comes to mind share for the masses, it’s easy for people to say what Google does. Its a search engine. I type in something, I get an answer. When the world go es to Yahoo.com, they have 400 choices. When the world goes to Google.com, they have one that sticks out tremendously. Search.
Google’s success came because they did the right thing from the beginning, and that was just focus on search. If Google would have tried to do what Yahoo! does at the beginning, it would have failed because it would have been competing for mindshare.