A $100,000 Check to a Company That Didn't Exist
On September 4, 1998, two Stanford graduate students filed the papers incorporating Google Inc. — the dorm-room project an investor had funded with a check written to a company that didn't yet exist.
In the summer of 1998, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim watched two Stanford graduate students demonstrate their search engine. He was so impressed that he wrote them a check for $100,000 on the spot — made out to "Google Inc."
There was just one problem: Google Inc. did not exist yet.
That check forced Larry Page and Sergey Brin's hand. On September 4, 1998, they filed the incorporation papers, and Google became a legal company. Then they took the money and moved into their first office: a garage attached to a rented house in Menlo Park, California, owned by a woman named Susan Wojcicki.
The company had grown out of a Stanford research project. Page and Brin, PhD students in computer science who met in the mid-1990s, were frustrated by the era's search engines, which mostly counted how many times a word appeared on a page. Their insight — developed in a project they first called BackRub — was that the web's links were like recommendations: a page that many other pages linked to was probably worth finding. They called the ranking system PageRank, registered the domain google.com in September 1997 (a playful twist on the mathematical term "googol," a one followed by a hundred zeroes), and set it loose.
It worked almost immediately. By the end of 1998, PC Magazine had given Google top honors in its search-engine category. The founders had even tried to sell their technology to an established company for about a million dollars — and nobody bought it.
The rest is Silicon Valley legend: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android, Chrome, a 2004 public listing, a parent company called Alphabet. More early investors followed — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among them. But it all started with a problem — a check with no company to cash it — and a garage with clunky desktop computers, a ping pong table, and bright blue carpet.
From the start, Page and Brin described their mission in sweeping terms: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The name Google — their playful misspelling of "googol" — was the first expression of that ambition: not just a lot of information, but a one-followed-by-a-hundred-zeroes lot.
One footnote: Google now celebrates its public birthday on September 27. But the legal paperwork — the birth certificate, so to speak — was filed on September 4, 1998.
Why it matters: before Google, finding something on the internet was a gamble; afterward, it was a habit. The engine that two students built as a school project became the front door to the world's information — and the little company that barely existed when its first check was written became one of the largest on Earth.
Photo: Jordiipa, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
