You probably think of a garage. Everyone does. It’s the classic Silicon Valley trope: two guys, a few computer parts, and a dream of organized information. But honestly, that’s the polished marketing version. When you ask google was founded by whom, the names Larry Page and Sergey Brin immediately pop up, yet the environment that birthed their partnership was less about "business" and more about academic obsession. They met at Stanford. They didn't even like each other at first.
Seriously.
Sergey was the outgoing, brash guide assigned to show Larry around the campus in 1995. They argued about everything. Most people forget that the world’s most powerful search engine started as a PhD dissertation topic. It wasn't a startup; it was a math problem. They wanted to know how to rank the importance of a webpage based on how many other pages linked to it. They called the original project BackRub. Thankfully, that name didn't last.
The Men Behind the Machine
So, google was founded by whom exactly? Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the names on the paperwork, but their backgrounds couldn't have been more different despite their shared genius.
Larry Page was the son of computer science professors. He grew up in Michigan surrounded by Popular Science magazines and discarded hardware. He was the visionary—the guy who dreamed of downloading the entire web. Sergey Brin, on the other hand, was a math prodigy who had emigrated from the Soviet Union when he was six. Brin brought the mathematical rigor that turned Page’s big ideas into functional code.
The Stanford Connection
Stanford University is the silent third founder here. Without the Stanford Digital Library Project, Google wouldn't exist. They used the university’s servers. They used the university’s bandwidth. In fact, for a long time, the URL was actually google.stanford.edu. It was a playground for two guys who had no intention of building a multi-billion dollar company. They just wanted to see if their algorithm, PageRank (named after Larry, not the "pages" of the web), actually worked.
It worked too well.
They eventually crashed Stanford’s internet connection. That’s usually when a university tells you to stop, but instead, it became clear they had something bigger than a thesis.
The $100,000 Check That Changed Everything
Business wasn't really their thing. They actually tried to sell the technology early on. They went to Excite—a major search engine at the time—and offered to sell it for $1 million. Excite said no. They even dropped the price to $750,000. Still no.
Imagine being the guy who turned down buying Google for less than the price of a modest house in San Francisco today.
Then came Andy Bechtolsheim. He was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He met them on a porch in Palo Alto. After a quick demo, he realized the potential and wrote a check for $100,000. One problem: the check was made out to "Google Inc."
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The company didn't exist yet.
Larry and Sergey had to quickly incorporate the company just so they could deposit the money. That’s the "founding" moment. It wasn't a grand strategy. It was a reaction to a check they couldn't cash. They officially incorporated on September 4, 1998.
Why the Garage Story is Kinda Misleading
We love the Susan Wojcicki garage story. Susan, who later became the CEO of YouTube, rented her garage to Larry and Sergey for $1,700 a month to help pay her mortgage. It’s a great story. But by the time they moved into that Menlo Park garage, they already had $100,000 in the bank and a growing user base. The garage was just a place to hide from the sun and work 20-hour days.
The real innovation wasn't the office space. It was the simplicity.
Back in 1998, the web was a mess. Yahoo, AltaVista, and Lycos were cluttered with ads, weather reports, and stock tickers. Google was just a logo and a search bar. That white space was revolutionary. It said, "We know what you want, and we aren't going to distract you."
The Technical Genius of PageRank
Most people get the "how" wrong. They think Google just looks for words on a page. Before Google, that’s exactly what search engines did. If you searched for "pizza," the engine looked for the page that said "pizza" the most times. It was easy to game.
Google was founded by whom? Two guys who realized that the web is a giant popularity contest.
They treated links like votes. If The New York Times linked to your pizza shop, that vote carried more weight than a link from your neighbor’s personal blog. This was the PageRank algorithm. It’s basically the same logic used in academic citations—the more times a paper is cited, the more important it must be.
The Growing Pains and the "Adult Supervision"
By 2001, Google was exploding. But Larry and Sergey were still acting like grad students. Their investors, particularly Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, weren't thrilled with the chaotic management style. They insisted on "adult supervision."
Enter Eric Schmidt.
While Larry and Sergey were the founders, Schmidt was the one who scaled it into a global titan. He became CEO in 2001. For a long time, Google was run by a triumvirate. It was a weird, three-headed leadership model that somehow worked. Larry focused on products, Sergey focused on special projects (the "moonshots"), and Eric handled the business, the lawyers, and the Wall Street investors.
Realities Most People Overlook
- The Name: It’s a play on "googol," which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was meant to signify the infinite amount of data they wanted to organize.
- The First Server: It was built out of Lego bricks. Seriously. They needed a cheap way to house 10 high-capacity hard drives, and Legos were the most flexible material they had on hand.
- The Ad Model: Google didn't have an ad model at first. They were actually against ads. They thought it would corrupt the search results. Eventually, they launched AdWords in 2000 with just 350 customers. It was the birth of the modern internet economy.
The Legacy of the Founders
Today, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have largely stepped back from day-to-day operations. Sundar Pichai took over as CEO of Google in 2015 and later Alphabet (the parent company). But the DNA of the company—the "Don't Be Evil" mantra (which was later moved from the code of conduct's preface to the end)—came directly from those early days at Stanford.
They changed how we access human knowledge. Think about that for a second. Before these two guys argued on a Stanford tour, finding information meant physical libraries, encyclopedias, or incredibly clunky digital directories. Now, "Google" is a verb.
Actionable Takeaways for the Curious
Knowing google was founded by whom is one thing, but understanding their approach can actually help you navigate the modern web or even start your own project.
Focus on the Core Problem
Don't worry about the bells and whistles. Larry and Sergey focused exclusively on search quality for years while competitors were trying to be "portals." If your core product isn't the best, nothing else matters.
Look for Academic Roots
Some of the best tech isn't built in a boardroom. It’s built in a lab. If you're looking for the next "big thing," look at what PhD students are currently obsessed with.
Embrace the Mess
The Google story is full of lucky breaks, rejected offers, and Lego servers. You don't need a perfect business plan to start. You need a solution that works better than what currently exists.
Verify the Source
Next time you search for something, remember that the results are still, at their heart, a result of the PageRank logic. Check who is "linking" to the information you consume. Authority still matters.
If you really want to understand the impact of Google's founding, stop looking at their current stock price. Look at your own behavior. How many times a day do you rely on a tool built by two guys who couldn't even agree on a tour of a college campus? That is the true scale of what Larry and Sergey built.
To see this in action, you can actually view the original 1990s Google interface through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It’s a humbling reminder of how small even the biggest giants start.