Happy 10th Birthday Google, or is it?
According to legend, ten years ago, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated their tiny company. The reason? So they could cash a $100,000 personal check that had been sitting in Page’s desk drawer for a couple of weeks.
As Stanford graduate students, Page and Brin had been working together on a search engine they called “BackRub” since early 1996. By 1998, with the encouragement of Yahoo co-founder David Filo, they decided to start a company, and went looking for investors to back them.
From the official company history:
“As a founder of Sun Microsystems, Andy Bechtolsheim was used to taking the long view. When he saw a demo of Google he knew it had potential. A lot of potential. While he had interest, he didn’t have a lot of time. According to Sergey, ‘We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, instead of us discussing all the details, why don’t I just write you a check? It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000.’
“The investment created a small dilemma. There was no way to deposit the check since there was no legal entity known as ‘Google Inc.’ It sat in Larry’s desk drawer for a couple of weeks while he and Sergey scrambled to set up a corporation and locate a few other funders among family, friends and acquaintances. Ultimately, they brought in a total initial investment of almost $1 million.”
And the rest is as they say; history. Google, Inc. was established on on September 7, 1998. BUT, they do not officially celebrate their birthday on this day.
Since 2005 (and also randomly in 2002), they’ve celebrated on September 27.
So why do they celebrate it on the 27th? They pushed the birthday date forward in 2005 to all for the announcement of a index size milestone.
At least Google is consistently inconsistent: “Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.”
KInda like my own birthday, which is tomorrow, but we won’t celebrate until later this month.
