Larry Page is a tale of both success and redemption – it’s not enough to just start a revolutionary company, you also need to know how to manage one.
Larry Page was born in 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan. Both his parents were involved in computer programming (such as that was in the 70’s) and his father had a PHD in computer science.
With his family background and attentive parents, it’s no surprise that he became interested in computers at age six.
Page earned a BSC in computer engineering at the University of Michigan, and a Masters at Stanford – which is where he met fellow computing whiz-kid Sergey Brin.
In 1996, at age 22, Page had a startling idea – to create a method of searching the internet by looking at the number of other pages which linked to a particular page, much like academic papers link back to other valuable papers. Page reasoned that the result which had the most links to it would probably be the most relevant result for a given search. At the time, search engines could only search for how many times the term appeared on any given page, meaning most results were irrelevant.
Together Page and Brin developed “BackRub” which operated on the Stanford servers. But Page knew that the number of links was only the start – he needed to analyse the quality and relevance of the links. He wrote an algorithm to do this called PageRank. The pair realised they now ha a powerful tool for searching the web.
Page and Brin decided to turn their project into a company in 1998. BackRub was renamed Google, after the mathematical term googol – 1 followed by 100 zeroes. They relocated their servers from Page’s dorm room to the place most tech giants seem to come from - a garage. This one belonged to a friend in Manlo Park, California. Following Google’s inception Page was named CEO, Brin was President.
Quickly outgrowing the garage, Google moved to Mountain View. To save space, page experimented with smaller server units so they could fit more into an area - this eventually meant Google ran much faster than any other search engine.
By June 2000, Google had indexed 1 billion URLs. At the same time, they brought in text ads related to searches on results pages.
But Page was under pressure from investors to step aside. His management style was abrupt and abrasive – arguments were considered the best way of hashing out ideas and projects – and as the company grew investors wanted a more experienced CEO. Although Page eventually agreed, his parting shot was to fire every project manager during an all-staff meeting. Page didn’t like engineers reporting to people with limited technical knowledge. Instead he decided they would all report to a VP of engineering who would report directly to him.
The idea, predictably, didn’t work. The project managers were integrated into Google’s growing operations organisation, and while some engineers thrived without supervision, more were left frustrated with no guidance and feedback, so projects were left under-resourced. Within a few months, project managers were hired again.
Eric Schmidt was brought in as the new CEO, and Page moved sideways to become President of Products. Brin was named President of Technology.
Although now a step removed from the day-to-day running of Google, Page made decisions with Schmidt and Brin as a trio.
Google had its IPO in August 2004, raising US$1.67 billion. Page became a multi-millionaire at 27.
Page was eventually convinced to hire a VP of products, but as the man hired was not a techie, Page regarded him with a measure of scorn. Slowly that relationship changed as Google began to hire engineers with business skills over MBAs, and Page relaxed his grip on his product engineers.
Page began to focus more on the development of Google’s products. He was the deciding voice in Google’s acquisition of YouTube, and approved the launch of Gmail in 2004 – but only once it was running fast enough to satisfy him.
He led the purchase of Android in 2006 to fulfil his ambition of seeing a handheld computer in everyone’s pockets – indeed he bought Android for US $50 million without telling Schmidt, who wasn’t bothered. The amount wasn’t big enough for Google to worry about spending.
By 2010 Google had 24,000 employees and was experiencing growing pains – engineers were no longer working on pet projects in small teams, and as result of that many were leaving for the competition.
With Google advertising essentially giving the company an unlimited budget, Page wanted to be more ambitious. He wanted to build products people couldn’t live without, not tweak ever-smaller aspects of what they were already doing.
To facilitate this, Page resumed the role of CEO in 2011. Now with more experience and better people skills, he revamped divisions, instigated a redesign of all Google products into a coherent look, and launched Google+.
Coming full circle, in 2013 Page set out to change the culture of aggression and argument which he had fostered in Google’s early days. He knew he himself needed to change, and that Google needed to change to continue being at the forefront of innovation.
Since then, Google has made advances in AI, self-driving cars, and biotechnology devices.
In 2015 Google was restructured into a number of subsidiaries of a new holding company called Alphabet Inc – of which Page is CEO.
And far from the abrasive manager of the past, in 2015 Page was named number one in Forbes’ list of most popular CEs, as voted by the company’s employees.