In 1999, Google was almost sold for $ 750,000, because the founders of the project did not have enough time to study.
In the world of technology, there are a few companies that stand out from the rest. One of them is Google. Google is now a global giant with an estimated net worth of $1.2 trillion. It is a company that has transformed the way people access information and has become an integral part of everyday life. However, it is interesting to note that in 1999, Google was almost sold for $750,000. This was because the founders of the project did not have enough time to study.
The history of Google goes back to 1995 when Larry Page, a computer science graduate from Stanford University, began working on a research project. The project aimed to develop a better way to search the internet. Page was joined by Sergey Brin, another computer science graduate from Stanford. The two young men had a vision of creating a search engine that would provide users with the most relevant search results possible.
In 1996, Page and Brin developed a prototype search engine called Backrub. Backrub was based on a new algorithm that Page had developed called PageRank. PageRank was a way to rank web pages based on their relevance to a particular search query. This was a revolutionary idea, and it quickly gained popularity among researchers.
In 1998, Page and Brin decided to commercialize their search engine. They founded a company called Google Inc. The name "Google" was inspired by the term "googol," which is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. This was intended to represent the vast amount of information that Google would be able to search.
Google quickly became popular, and by 1999, it was receiving over 500,000 search queries per day. However, the company was still in its early stages, and Page and Brin were struggling to manage the rapid growth. They were also having trouble securing funding to keep the company afloat.
In the summer of 1999, Page and Brin met with Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Bechtolsheim was impressed with the Google search engine and offered to invest $100,000 in the company. This was a significant amount of money for Page and Brin, but they still needed more to keep the company running.
Around the same time, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, was trying to secure funding from venture capitalists. He managed to secure a meeting with John Doerr, a prominent venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. Doerr was impressed with Google's search engine and offered to invest $12 million in the company. However, Doerr had one condition – he wanted to buy the company for $750,000.
Page and Brin were faced with a difficult decision. On the one hand, they desperately needed the funding to keep the company afloat. On the other hand, they believed that Google had the potential to become a billion-dollar company. They decided to turn down Doerr's offer and continue to build the company themselves.
Page and Brin knew that they needed to make some changes if they wanted Google to succeed. They hired Schmidt as CEO in 2001 to help manage the rapid growth of the company. They also began to diversify their offerings, launching products such as Google AdWords and Google Maps.
These changes paid off. By 2004, Google had become one of the most popular websites in the world. It had also become a profitable company, with revenues of over $3 billion per year. In 2004, Google went public, and its founders became billionaires overnight.
Looking back, it is easy to see that turning down Doerr's offer was the right decision. Google is now a global giant, and its founders are among the richest people in the world.
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