I recently read The Google Story by David Vise; it is an interesting read, the google guys certainly worked extremely hard to get to where they are today. However, one thing I did notice (it’s hard not to miss), is the fact that they met at Stanford University in America and everyone they subsequently worked with seemed to have the same educational background. As I read the book, I started to think that to be a successful entrepreneur I needed to be surrounded by only those who had been educated by the “best” universities in the world!

The story itself is written in a very positive, glowing light of the google guys – Larry Page and Sergey Brin - David Vise almost refuses to write anything negative about them. (The book wasn’t endorsed in anyway by Google Inc), but you would never know it. At times it can almost become a little nauseating. The story is quite in depth though and does highlight the challenges the google guys had, although compared to most entrepreneurs they were fortunate enough to be continually given contacts of people who would help them (venture capitalists/advisors etc). Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos provided advice for example.

Page and Brin hooked up around their interest of downloading and analyzing web links. ‘Page had a theory. Counting the number of links pointing to a Web site was a way of ranking a site’s popularity’. He began calling this ranking “PageRank” after himself! The sites with the most links to them became more important than those sites that had fewer. The guys started out using their search engine on their university website and asked for feedback from fellow students – they also relied heavily on word of mouth for their initial success.

Although the guys didn’t like the idea of advertising on their site – they saw the importance of advertising and decided on producing simple text ads initially. The guys then had another idea of ranking adverts based on relevance; adverts were to be displayed based on how much someone offered to pay and how frequently computer users clicked on the advert. The more clicks on the advert, the higher the advert rose to the top. We all now battle to get to the top of the rankings!

In 2001 the company made its first profit of $7million.

I would recommend you read the book as it does provide an interesting insight into the set up of the business, I got mine from amazon - it's cheap around £5 - $12

Oh and in case you're interested the vision of the founders of Google Inc is "Do No Evil"