Legendary Investor Ron Conway explains the early days of Google

Yes. SV Angel came on the scene in 1999, when Larry and Sergey had known each other for four years by then. But it's important to know that Larry and Sergey met each other when they were PhD students at Stanford. Larry was 24, Sergey was 23. So these are young PhD students who meet each other and start working together. And at the time, the need for a better search engine was everywhere, just like the AI discussion is today. It was the topic du jour. If you met somebody at a cocktail party, you were talking about search companies. It was the gold rush, as I said earlier. But it was what everyone was obsessed with. So Larry and Sergey, like everybody else, said, 'Hey, why don't we come up with a solution?' And theirs, funny enough, they nicknamed it 'Backrub' was the original name of the search engine. But being PhD students, their solution was more scientific. They thought that if you analyze the web's forward and back links to determine page rank. Funny enough, Larry Page, page rank. Yeah, I'm sure they didn't care about that, but they cared about page rank and that the search should be relevant. And when you say page rank and relevant today about search, it's ho-hum, right? At the time, just even the thought of using backlinks for page rank to get to page rank was a revolutionary thought. Then they had to write an algorithm to make that happen.

Okay. And because of the high interest in search, people at Stanford in the engineering department knew the term Backrub.

Exactly. So if a lot of people, you know, in the early days the algorithm was more fundamental. It became hugely sophisticated over time, and the reason Google is still the market leader is they still invest heavily in R&D to continue to be the leader in search. But back then, if people asked the same question and they kept going to this one particular site, that site must be giving them the answer. So let's just go ahead and send other people there to that site.

Yes. So when you become a PhD, you get assigned a PhD advisor, and that person is assigned to you. But PhD students, I learned all of this after investing in Google and investing in other startups that came out of Stanford University. You get assigned a professor, but because everyone in a PhD program, including the ones who are already PhDs, are super curious people and they all interact with each other about the technology that they're working on. So Larry and Sergey got assigned professors, but they also hung out with many others. And Larry and Sergey became particularly close to Rajeev because Rajeev had expertise in this area. This was an area that already fit Rajeev's fancy. Whereas the other PhD professors that they got assigned to may have not been thinking about this particular area. But this is an area that Rajeev was very well-versed in. So they got closer to Rajeev than others.