What were the key decisions that Page & Brin made in the early days of Google?

<i>Larry Page's brother Carl Page had experience with venture capitalists, having sold eGroups to Yahoo for $432 million.</i><p>I did not know that.<p>I did know Bill Gates' mom was on the United Way executive committee with IBM's CEO.<p>I think these details are often omitted because we like to promote the idea that all you need is hard work and talent and perhaps a bit of luck to succeed.<p>We tend to not like stories about success as a function of familiar ties. This may have something to do with our distaste for monarchies and aristocracies.<p>It's also a bit depressing when you're working on a startup but no one in your family is well off, and no one is on a board with the CEO of a huge and potential partner, and your brother did not sell his startup for hundreds of millions.

This appeared on HN 250 days ago - <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502765" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502765</a><p>As pg and paul (Buchheit - Google employee #23) point out, the top answer is inaccurate and misleading about what factors were really important.<p>As paul said: <i>Unfortunately it's written in an authoratative style, so people assume it's true and upvote, demonstrating one of the major flaws in vote based systems.</i>

Discussed pretty heavily here, with a rebuttal to the top post from pg and Buchheit: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502765" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502765</a>

I was the 4th guy there, only stayed a while because I wanted to do my own thing.<p>The thing that struct me the first time I went into the house in menlo park where they got started was that instead of techy books on their desks, there were stacks of books on hiring. That was new to me, usually the geeks are thinking about engineering and if not that, marketing.

I stopped reading after "Early NSA partnership."

Here's my stab (probably about as accurate as any of the misleading answers on quora):<p>0: realizing that search was important on its own (it wasn't a loss leader or a gimmick to get people to visit your portal where the real content and money making happened)<p>1: using cutting edge research to improve search result quality based on human factors (page rank)<p>2: using cutting edge computer science to create highly efficient search systems through sharding and aggressive parallelization.<p>3: facilitating aggressive parallelization through highly automated data center operations relying on large quantities of consumer grade hardware.<p>4: continuing concentration on human factors (UI simplicity, search result speed, unobtrusive advertisements, etc.)<p>All of these together made google a juggernaut, with some of them google would have been successful but maybe not dominant, with all of them nobody could touch google so long as they managed to monetize well. Better search results faster at lower cost per query and with much higher click-through rates for ads. That's a world beating formula right there.

Just do it. Now.

Not all the decisions we're made by them, you'd probably also have to thank Yahoo and a bunch of other companies for refusing to buy them.<p>I can only imagine how Yahoo would have destroyed that company.