The Untold Story of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback

Google was a company built on the values of its founders, who harbored ambitions to build a powerful corporation that would impact the entire world, at the same time loathing the bureaucracy and commitments that running such a company would entail.

Google was not pre-ordained to become a trillion-dollar business. In 2002, for example, the budding search engine company was treated with some skepticism. The New York Times titled a piece from that year, “Google’s Toughest Search Is for a Business Model,” summarizing the market’s concerns. One Salomon Smith Barney analyst more directly articulat

On the other end of the spectrum were kids like Larry Page, who would come in and say, “Here’s what I think I can do.” And his proposals were crazy. He’d come into the office and talk about doing something with space tethers or solar kites.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t set out to create one of the fastest-growing startup companies in history; they didn’t even start out seeking to revolutionize the way we search for information on the web. Their first goal, as collaborators on the Stanford Digital Library Project, was to solve a much smaller problem: how to priorit