The Google Boys: Sergey Brin and Larry Page In Their Own Words

Page: I have a story about following dreams…it’s a story about finding a path to make those dreams real….
Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: What if we could download the whole Web, and just keep the links, and…I grabbed a pen and started writing!…Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But much later, we happened upon a better way of ranking Web pages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!
—University of Michigan commencement speech, May 2, 2009

And if you need more information, you can always Google it

portrait in words of both men, who have created a business model in Google that may well be a template for businesses in the future

Page and Brin—unlike industry icons like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates—have spent as little time as possible in front of the media. It’s not that they are camera shy; they simply see public relations and marketing as support functions, and thus of secondary concern. In fact, in the early years, Page told the PR department that he’d allot only eight hours annually for interviews, press appearances, and press releases. As a result, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin spare time to speak, people listen carefully.

Google did not begin with a hunger for fame or financial success. Unlike the other dot-coms of its time, which often followed a predictable model—create a product, get investor funding, and hope to retire young and rich—Google began with a hunger for information.

We need a new “specialist” who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We need a new science to be the perfect secretary to all other sciences.

The greatest crisis facing us is…in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous “encyclopedia,” which isn’t even arranged alphabetically. Our “file cards” are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side, and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.