The Innovators

  Like Steve Jobs and Alan Kay, Larry’s other love besides computers was music. He played the saxophone and studied composition. During summers, he went to the famous music camp at Interlochen in northern Michigan. It had a method for crowdsourcing the rank of each kid: at the beginning of camp, kids were assigned chairs in the orchestra, and anyone could challenge the person a seat above them; the two competitors were given a selection of music, and all of the other kids would face the other direction and then vote on who sounded better. “After a while, things would kind of calm down, and everyone would kind of know where they were,” he said.120

  Page’s parents not only taught at Michigan but had met as students there, so they were only half joking when they told him that he would go there as well. He did. He made a point of majoring in business as well as computer science, partly because of the cautionary tale of Tesla, who could invent but not commercialize. In addition, he had a role model in his brother, Carl, nine years older, who after college became a cofounder of an early social network company that was later sold to Yahoo! for $413 million.

  The college course that made the greatest impression on him, Page said, was one on human-computer interaction taught by Judith Olson. The goal was to understand how to design interfaces that were easy and intuitive. Page did his research paper on the display of the Eudora mail client, estimating and then testing how long it would take to perform various tasks. He discovered, for example, that command keys actually slowed people down by 0.9 second compared to using a mouse. “I feel like I developed an intuition for how people will interact with a screen, and I realized those things were pretty important,” he said. “But they’re not well understood, even to this day.”121

  One summer during his college years, Page went to a camp run by a leadership training institute called LeaderShape. It encouraged students to have a “healthy disregard for the impossible.” The institute inculcated in him a desire, which he would indulge at Google, to launch projects that others considered to be on the borderline between audacious and insane. In particular, both at Michigan and later, he pushed futuristic ideas for personal transportation systems and driverless cars.122

  When it came time to go to graduate school, Page was rejected by MIT but accepted by Stanford. That was fortuitous; for someone interested in the intersection of technology and business, Stanford was the place to be. Ever since the Stanford grad Cyril Elwell had founded Federal Telegraph in 1909, tech entrepreneurship was not merely tolerated but expected there, an attitude that was reinforced when the engineering dean Fred Terman built an industrial park on university land in the early 1950s. Even among the faculty, the focus was on startup business plans as much as on scholarly publications. “That’s the kind of professor I wanted, one who has one foot in industry and wants to do crazy stuff that’s world-breaking,” Page said. “A lot of Stanford computer science professors are that way.”123

  At the time, most other elite universities emphasized scholarly research and avoided commercial endeavors. Stanford led the way in regarding the university not just as an academy but as an incubator. Among the companies spawned by Stanford were Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems. Page, who would eventually add the biggest name of all to that list, believed that this outlook actually improved the research. “I think the productivity of pure research was a lot higher, because it had a real-world grounding,” he maintained. “It’s not just theoretical. You want what you’re working on to apply to a real problem.”124

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  As he was preparing to enroll in Stanford’s graduate school in the fall of 1995, Page participated in an orientation program that included a day in San Francisco. His guide was a gregarious second-year grad student named Sergey Brin. Page was naturally quiet, but Brin kept peppering him with opinions, and soon they were arguing about topics ranging from computers to urban zoning. They hit it off perfectly. “I remember thinking he was pretty obnoxious,” Page admitted. “That’s still the case. And maybe vice versa.”125 Yes, the feeling was mutual. “We both found each other obnoxious,” Brin conceded. “But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going.”126

  Sergey Brin’s parents were also academics, both mathematicians, but his childhood was very different from Page’s. Brin was born in Moscow, where his father taught math at Moscow State University and his mother was a research engineer at the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute. Because they were Jewish, their careers were curtailed. “We were quite poor,” Sergey told the journalist Ken Auletta. “My parents, both of them, went through periods of hardship.” When his father applied to emigrate, he and his wife lost their jobs. Their exit visas came through in May 1979, when Sergey was five. With the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, they settled in a working-class neighborhood near the University of Maryland, where his father got a job as a math professor and his mother became a researcher at the nearby NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

  Sergey went to a Montessori school, where independent thinking was nurtured. “It’s not like somebody is telling you what to do,” he said. “You have to plot your own path.”127 It was something he shared with Page. When asked later whether having parents who were professors was a key to their success, they both cited going to Montessori schools as a more important factor. “I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world and doing things a little bit differently,” Page contended.128

  Another thing Brin shared with Page was that his parents gave him a computer when he was very young, a Commodore 64 for his ninth birthday. “The ability to program your own computer was much more accessible than it is today,” he recalled. “The computer came with a built-in BASIC interpreter,VII and you could right away start writing your own programs.” In middle school, Brin and a friend wrote programs that tried to simulate artificial intelligence by carrying on a text conversation with the user. “I don’t think that kids starting out with computers today get as welcome of an entry to programming as I did.”129

  His rebellious attitude toward authority almost got him in trouble when his father took him back to Moscow for a visit when he was turning seventeen. Seeing a police car, he started throwing pebbles at it. The two officers got out of the car to confront Sergey, but his parents were able to defuse the situation. “My rebelliousness, I think, came out of being born in Moscow. I’d say this is something that followed me into adulthood.”130

  Among the books that inspired Brin were the memoirs of the physicist Richard Feynman, who touted the power that comes from joining art to science the way that Leonardo da Vinci did. “I remember he had an excerpt where he was explaining how he really wanted to be a Leonardo, an artist and a scientist,” said Brin. “I found that pretty inspiring. I think that leads to having a fulfilling life.”131

  He was able to graduate from high school in three years and do the same at the University of Maryland, where he got an undergraduate degree in math and computer science. For a while, he and his fellow computer geeks liked to hang around on the Internet’s bulletin boards and chat rooms, until he got bored with “ten-year-old boys trying to talk about sex.” He then got involved in the text-based online games known as Multi-User Dungeons, writing one of his own that involved a mailman who delivered explosive packages. “I spent enough time MUDding to think it was cool,” Brin recalled.132 In the spring of 1993, his final year at Maryland, he downloaded the Mosaic browser, which Andreessen had just released, and became mesmerized by the Web.

  Brin went to Stanford on a National Science Foundation scholarship, where he decided to focus on the study of data mining. (In a double whammy, to itself if not to them, MIT rejected him as well as Page.) There were eight comprehensive tests he needed to pass for his doctorate, and he aced seven of them soon after he arrived. “The one I thought I was best at, I didn’t pass,” he recalled. “I went to th
e prof and debated the answers. I wound up talking him into it. So I passed all eight.”133 That left him free to dabble in whatever courses he wanted and to indulge his quirky athletic interests in acrobatics, trapeze, sailing, gymnastics, and swimming. He could walk on his hands and, so he claimed, once considered running away and joining the circus. He was also an avid rollerblader, and was often seen zipping through the halls.

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  A few weeks after Page arrived at Stanford, he and Brin moved with the rest of the Computer Science Department into the new Gates Computer Science Building.VIII Annoyed by the uninspired numbering system for offices that the architect had provided, Brin devised a new system, which was adopted, that conveyed better the location of each room and the distance between them. “It was very intuitive, if I may say so,” he said.134 Page was assigned to a room with three other graduate students, and Brin made that his base as well. There were hanging plants with a computer-controlled watering system, a piano connected to a computer, an assortment of electronic toys, and sleeping pads for naps and all-nighters.

  The inseparable duo became linked, in CamelCase fashion, as LarryAndSergey, and when engaged in argument or banter they were like two swords sharpening each other. Tamara Munzner, the only woman in the group, had a phrase for it: “goofy smart,” she called them, especially when they took to debating absurd concepts, such as whether it was possible to construct something the size of a building using only lima beans. “They were fun guys to share an office with,” she said. “We all kept crazy hours. I remember once at three in the morning on a Saturday night, the office was full.”135 The duo was notable not only for their brilliance but for their boldness. “They didn’t have this false respect for authority,” according to Professor Rajeev Motwani, one of their advisors. “They were challenging me all the time. They had no compunction in saying to me, ‘You’re full of crap!’ ”136

  Like many great partners in innovation, LarryAndSergey had complementary personalities. Page was not a social animal; he could make eye contact with a screen more easily than with a stranger. A chronic vocal cord problem, stemming from a viral infection, meant that he spoke in a whispery and raspy voice, and he had a disconcerting (although in many ways admirable) habit of simply not talking at times, which made his utterances, when they did occur, all the more memorable. He could be impressively detached but was sometimes intensely engaging. His smile was quick and real, his face expressive, and he listened with a focus that could be both flattering and unnerving. Intellectually rigorous, he could find logical flaws in the most mundane comments and effortlessly steer a shallow conversation into a deep discussion.

  Brin, for his part, could be charmingly brash. He would barge into offices without knocking, blurt out ideas and requests, and engage on any subject. Page was more reflective and reserved. Whereas Brin was satisfied knowing that something worked, Page would ruminate about why it worked. The intense and talkative Brin dominated a room, but Page’s quiet comments at the end of a discussion made people lean forward and listen. “I was probably a little bit more shy than Sergey, although he’s shy in some ways,” Page observed. “We had a great partnership, because I maybe thought more broadly and had different skills. I’m trained as a computer engineer. I’m more knowledgeable about the hardware. He has more of a mathematical background.”137

  What particularly amazed Page was how smart Brin was. “I mean, he was just unusually smart, even for somebody at the Computer Science Department.” In addition, Brin’s outgoing personality helped him bring people together. When Page arrived at Stanford, he was given a desk in an open room known as the bullpen with the other new graduate students. “Sergey was pretty social,” Page said. “He would meet all the students and come hang out in the bullpen with us.” Brin even had a knack for befriending the professors. “Sergey had this way of walking into professors’ offices and hanging out with them, which was kind of unusual for a grad student. I think they tolerated it because he was so smart and knowledgeable. He could contribute on all sorts of random things.”138

  Page joined the Human-Computer Interaction Group, which explored ways to enhance the symbiosis between humans and machines. It was the field that had been pioneered by Licklider and Engelbart, and it had been the subject of his favorite course at Michigan. He became an adherent of the concept of user-centered design, which insisted that software and computer interfaces must be intuitive and that the user was always right. He had gone to Stanford knowing that he wanted as his advisor Terry Winograd, a joyful, Einstein-haired professor. Winograd had studied artificial intelligence but, after reflecting on the essence of human cognition, changed his focus, as Engelbart had, to how machines could augment and amplify (rather than replicate and replace) human thinking. “I shifted my view away from what would be thought of as artificial intelligence to the broader question, ‘How do you want to interact with a computer?’ ” Winograd explained.139

  The field of human-computer interactions and interface design, despite its noble heritage from Licklider, was still considered a rather soft discipline, looked down upon by hardnosed computer scientists as something usually taught by mere psychology professors, which Licklider and Judith Olson had once been. “For people studying Turing machines or whatever, dealing with human responses was considered very touchy-feely, almost like you’re stuck in the humanities,” according to Page. Winograd helped make the field more reputable. “Terry had a hard computer science background from his time working on artificial intelligence, but he was also interested in human-computer interaction, a field that nobody much was working on and I think didn’t get enough respect.” One of Page’s favorite courses was Film Craft in User Interface Design. “It showed how the language and techniques of film can actually be applied to computer interface designs,” he said.140

  Brin’s academic focus was on data mining. With Professor Motwani, he started a group called Mining Data at Stanford, or MIDAS. Among the papers they produced (along with another graduate student, Craig Silverstein, who would become the first hire when they founded Google) were two on market basket analysis, a technique that assesses to what extent a consumer who buys items A and B is more or less likely also to buy items C and D.141 From that Brin became interested in ways to analyze patterns from the data trove on the Web.

  * * *

  With Winograd’s help, Page began casting around for a dissertation topic. He considered close to a dozen ideas, including one on how to design self-driving cars, as Google would later do. Eventually he homed in on studying how to assess the relative importance of different sites on the Web. His method came from growing up in an academic environment. One criterion that determines the value of a scholarly paper is how many other researchers cite it in their notes and bibliography. By the same theory, one way to determine the value of a Web page was to look at how many other Web pages linked to it.

  There was a problem. The way that Tim Berners-Lee had designed the Web, much to the consternation of hypertext purists such as Ted Nelson, anyone could create a link to another page without getting permission, registering the link in a database, or having the link work in both directions. That permitted the Web to expand willy-nilly. But it also meant that there was no simple way of knowing the number of links pointing to a Web page or where those links might be coming from. You could look at a Web page and see all the links going out, but you couldn’t see the number or the quality of the links pointing into it. “The Web was a poorer version of other collaboration systems I had seen because its hypertext had a flaw: it didn’t have bidirectional links,” said Page.142

  So Page set about trying to figure out a way to gather a huge database of the links so that he could follow them in reverse and see which sites were linking to each page. One motivation was to foster collaboration. His scheme would allow folks to annotate another page. If Harry wrote a comment and linked it to Sally’s website, then people looking at her website could go see his comment. “By reversing the links, making it possible to
trace them backwards, it would allow people to comment on or annotate a site simply by linking to it,” Page explained.143

  Page’s method for reversing links was based on an audacious idea that struck him in the middle of the night when he woke up from a dream. “I was thinking: What if we could download the whole Web, and just keep the links,” he recalled. “I grabbed a pen and started writing. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work.”144 His nocturnal burst of activity served as a lesson. “You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set,” he later told a group of Israeli students. “There is a phrase I learned in college called, ‘Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not.”145

  Mapping the web was not a simple task. Even back then, in January 1996, there were 100,000 websites with a total of 10 million documents and close to a billion links between them, and it was growing exponentially each year. Early that summer, Page created a Web crawler that was designed to start on his home page and follow all of the links it encountered. As it darted like a spider through the Web, it would store the text of each hyperlink, the titles of the pages, and a record of where each link came from. He called the project BackRub.

  Page told his advisor Winograd that, according to his rough estimate, his Web crawler would be able to accomplish the task in a few weeks. “Terry nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me,” Page recalled. “The optimism of youth is often underrated!”146 The project was soon taking up almost half of Stanford’s entire Internet bandwidth, and it caused at least one campuswide outage. But university officials were indulgent. “I am almost out of disk space,” Page emailed Winograd on July 15, 1996, after he had collected 24 million URLs and more than 100 million links. “I have only about 15% of the pages but it seems very promising.”147