From the garage to the Googleplex

The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brina student therewas assigned to show him around.

By some accountsthey disagreed about nearly everything during that first meetingbut by the following year they struck a partnership. Working from their dorm roomsthey built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub.

Soon afterBackrub was renamed Google (phew). The name was a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and aptly reflected Larry and Sergey's mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Over the next few yearsGoogle caught the attention of not only the academic communitybut Silicon Valley investors as well. In August 1998Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000and Google Inc. was officially born. With this investmentthe newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo ParkCaliforniaowned by Susan Wojcicki (employee #16 and former CEO of YouTube). Clunky desktop computersa ping pong tableand bright blue carpet set the scene for those early days and late nights. (The tradition of keeping things colorful continues to this day.)

Even in the beginningthings were unconventional: from Google’s initial server (made of Lego) to the first “Doodle” in 1998: a stick figure in the logo announcing to site visitors that the entire staff was playing hooky at the Burning Man Festival. “Don't be evil” captured the spirit of our intentionally unconventional methods. In the years that followedthe company expanded rapidly — hiring engineersbuilding a sales teamand introducing the first company dog Yoshka . Google outgrew the garage and eventually moved to its current headquarters (a.k.a.“The Googleplex”) in Mountain ViewCalifornia. The spirit of doing things differently made the move. So did Yoshka.

The relentless search for better answers continues to be at the core of everything we do. TodayGoogle makes hundreds of products used by billions of people across the globefrom YouTube and Android to Gmail andof courseGoogle Search. Although we’ve ditched the Lego servers and added just a few more company dogsour passion for building technology for everyone has stayed with us — from the dorm roomto the garageand to this very day.