Newly Minted Tycoons
Page (left) and Brin
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the success of Larry Page and Sergey Brin stemmed from inventing algorithms that produced the planet’s premier search engine. Their bigger innovation was based on faith, not science. They originally had no advertising or subscription model for Google, believing it more important to first earn the trust of users. So they rejected ads on the Google home page; they rejected the belief, common at the time, that you had to trap users in your portal, instead dispatching users from Google.com to other sites. And when they finally figured out an advertising auction system, Google earned the trust of advertisers by allowing them to bid and then charging them only a penny more than the second bidder, and only if the searcher clicked on an ad. Page and Brin’s faith in first building trust would become a model for the next generation of Silicon Valley companies, including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Where two young computer scientists just out of Stanford got such clarity is a mystery. Not a mystery is how they employed the engineer’s favorite question—Why?—to transform not just search but the world of media. Why, they asked, can’t all the world’s 20 million books be digitized? Why can’t newspapers and magazines be aggregated on Google News? Why can’t phone calls be free? Why pay ad agencies 4 or 5 percent to purchase an ad and guess at the results? Traditional media is still digesting the questions, and the answers.
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