AcquiredI think there's this perception today that Larry and Sergei were these, like, bumbling academic guys who weren't really business minded, and Google was a research project, and this all sorta happened by accident that they built the best business of all time. Like, absolutely freaking not.
“Part of the reason I say all this, and I wanna include Sergei too in what I'm about to say even though we haven't introduced him yet in the story.”
But back to Larry here. Part of the reason I say all this, and I wanna include Sergei too in what I'm about to say even though we haven't introduced him yet in the story. I think there's this perception today that Larry and Sergei were these, like, bumbling academic guys who weren't really business minded, and Google was a research project, and this all sorta happened by accident that they built the best business of all time. Like, absolutely freaking not.
Why this clip
Direct challenge to conventional wisdom about Google's founders with emphatic language ('absolutely freaking not'). Highly quotable contrarian take that reframes the Google origin story.
What they said next
Larry goes back and ultimately has the breakthrough leap. Oh, we supply rankings to web pages themselves. Larry says, wow. The big problem here is not annotation. We should use it not for ranking annotations, but for ranking searches. Ding ding ding ding ding. And thus, at least the germ of the idea for PageRank as we all know it today is born.
18:51 - 36s · Origin Story
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