Google's Garage Roots: A $100k Cheque that Changed History

In 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University. The chance encounter sparked a partnership that would change the world.

The pair started working together and built a search engine that worked differently from others at the time. Instead of just matching keywords, it looked at links between pages to figure out which ones mattered most. They called this early project Backrub.

By 1998, Google had caught the attention of people beyond the Stanford campus. Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a cheque for $100,000 made out to a company called Google Inc. However, Google Inc. did not exist yet on paper, prompting Page and Brin to quickly form the company.

Google was still running out of a garage in Menlo Park, California. The space was simple, filled with basic desktop computers, a ping pong table, and bright blue carpet. From that garage, Google slowly built its first team and started shaping the company culture that still shows up today.