Lawrence Edward Page, the one behind the creation of the most amazing search engine known to mankind, Google.
Larry Page: A Brief Introduction
He was born in March 26th in the year 1973. Currently, Page is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company). Back in 2001, he stepped aside as Google’s CEO, but then he re-assumed the role in the year 2011. Just after 4 years i.e. 2015, he called himself off as the CEO for the second time, to become the CEO of Alphabet.
As of December 2018, just last year, Page was ranked 8th in the list of richest people in the world, with a net worth of $51.3 billion. On the other hand, Forbes placed him 10th in their list of “Billionaires 2019”. Well, that’s just a brief study of his achievements, and now it’s time for us to dig deep into his life and career.
The “Who Founded Google” Story
Let’s go back to the year 1995, in the Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergie Brin started a process of developing a search engine as a part of their research project and they named it as “backRub”. The motive was to design a search engine that can help an individual explore the connecting links between web pages so as to determine a site’s authority.
The year was 1996, when Page’s web crawler began to explore the web, with Stanford’s home page serving as the initial phase. After 2 whole years, Page and Brin altogether decided to incorporate their company and set up their first data center in a garage.
Soon after that, they both started looking out for investors to back their initiative. After a certain period of time, Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, invested about $100,000 in their company. Over a certain period of time, both of them managed to raise an amount of $1 million.
Finally, Google, Inc. was established in the year 1998 on September 7th. The company’s first employee was Craig Silverstein, who then later became Google’s Director of Technology. Back then, Google was known to be serving over 10,000 queries & slow and steadily gained a reputation of the most reliable source of information. By the year 1999, it was serving more than 500,000 queries per day. Who would’ve known that project which was started out in the garage will become a multimillion empire today?
Early Management of Google
During his very first tenure as a CEO, Page initiated on an attempt to fire all of Google’s project managers in 2001. His plan involved every single Google engineer reporting to a VP of engineering, who would then report directly to him. He stated that he didn’t like non-engineers supervising engineer due to their limited technical knowledge. He even documented his management principles for his team to use as a reference.
- Don’t delegate: do everything possible to make yourself work faster.
- Don’t even bother to come in the way if you are not adding any value whatsoever. Let people do their work, talk to each other while you are doing something else.
- Don’t be a bureaucrat.
- Ideas are more important than someone’s age. Just because someone is junior doesn’t mean they don’t deserve respect and equality. If you do so, don’t even bother to come.
- The worst thing you can do is to stop someone from doing something by just saying, “No”. The point is if you say no, you have to help them find another way to get that work done.
Even though his new model was unsustainable and led to disagreement among the employees, his issues with non-engineers staff took the wrong turn in no time.
He believed that the faster Google’s search engine returned answers, the more it will be used. Well, he was right, don’t you agree. He caused a state of panic among the engineers-from those who developed algorithms to those who built data centers to think about the lag times.
On Forbes lists
- #10 billionaires 2019
- #6 Forbes 400 2018
- #10 Powerful People 2018
- #5 Richest in Tech
Awards and Accolades
Have you ever heard of the PC Magazine? If not then, it’s sad as this Magazine has listed Google among the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998). Moreover, Google also received a technical excellence award for Innovation in Web Application Development in the year 1999.
In 2001, Google received a Weebly Award, following a People’s Voice Award for technical achievement and in the same year, was awarded an Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Search Feature, and Best Design at the Search Engine Watch Awards.
In the year 2003, both Page and Brin received an MBA from IE Business School. The year was 2004 when they received the Marconi Foundation’s prize and were also elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Colombia University.
So, those were some of the awards which they both received and of course their company as well.
Other interests
Page is a constant investor in Tesla Motors. As a matter of fact, he has invested in harvesting of renewable energy and of course, he is one of the individuals behind the concept of adopting plug-in hybrid electric cars.
He also seems interested in the socio-economic effects of advanced intelligent systems and how it can be incorporated to fulfill people’s needs, to shorten the workweek, etc. he also helped in setting up Singularity University. Google is one of the institution’s corporate founders and still funds scholarships on a regular basis.
Changes and Consolidation process of Google
At least 70 of Google’s products, features and services were shut down in the year 2013. Jon Wiley, the lead designer of Google Search at that time, codenamed Page’s redesign overhaul, which officially came into being on April 4, 2011 “Project Kennedy,” and was based out of Page’s use of the term “moonshots” to describe some projects in a wired interview on January 2013.
Eventually, the results of “Kennedy” which were rolled out from the year 2011 to 2013 were described as “focused upon refinement, white space, cleanliness, and most of all simplicity.
New Strategy and Products
As Facebook was rolling out pretty quickly in the market during Page’s second tenure, he himself responded to the intense competition between Google’s own social network, Google+, in mid-2011. Just after a few days, the social network was released through a very limited field test.
The year was 2011 when Larry Page announced that Google will be spending $12.5 billion to take over the Motorola Mobility. The motive was to secure the patents to protect Android from lawsuits by companies including Apple Inc. itself.
So, this was the journey of Google and its creator, Larry Page. We hope that you’ll find this journey quite fascinating since Google is involved in it. To be honest, when I was writing this article, I came to realize that there were so many things that I had no idea even happened during his tenure as a CEO of Google.
Final Thoughts
As a former CEO of Google, Larry Page is a living example for all us to not to give up on any grounds possible. “You never lose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby” this one of the most famous quotes of Larry Page which we should really apply on our day-to-day lives.