In 1999, Google cofounder dreamed of a second startup
Ubergizmo writer Karsten Lemm visited Google headquarters in 1999 — Apt. 106 in a building on 555 Bryant Street, Palo Alto — and sometime during the interview, Google cofounder Larry Page handed him this card, printed from an inkjet printer. Check out the Google logo and its exclamation mark — an artifact of a time when the brightest future Page and cofounder Sergey Brin could imagine was "to be on par with Yahoo, or Amazon, AOL." In recognition of Google's 10th anniversary, Lemm republished the entire interview. My favorite part is when he asks the cofounders, "Where do you see yourselves in, say, five years from now?" and Brin answers in a way that reminds you Google wasn't always the obvious success it is now.
That's a long way down the sea. There are a lot of benefits for us, aside from potential financial success. The experience, for example. If we want to start another company at some point, that would be fairly easy because we have all the contacts in the industry. Also, it's been very exciting. I really enjoyed being a Ph.D. at Stanford, but at Google, we do lots of really different things involved in setting up a company. We take care of very many things you don't get to see if you're just purely focused on creating technology. There's one more important thing, and that's to bring what we've done to the world. That's very exciting, too, of course. And we think this does have a potential to really change things forever.