TL;DR

In the early nineties, finding useful information on the internet was challenging. This was due to the rudimentary nature of search engines. They often functioned more like directories. Both Yahoo! Search and LookSmart launched in 1995. In 1996, two guys from Berkeley, California, founded Ask Jeeves. This search engine was innovative at the time. Users asked “Jeeves” questions rather than searching with keywords. They launched it in 1997, but Ask Jeeves had limitations. The breakthrough came from Larry Page, a PhD student at Stanford University. He developed the PageRank algorithm. It ranked web pages based on the quantity and quality of backlinks. This laid down the groundwork for what would become Google. Larry Page collaborated with a fellow PhD student whom he met at Stanford. His name is Sergey Brin. They called their project “Backrub.” Which aimed to map the web’s link structure. It soon outgrew Stanford’s network resources. This problem led them to pursue a more scalable solution.

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In 1993, Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem met at a Denny’s in San Jose, California. They talked about creating a chip for realistic 3D graphics on personal computers. This is the origin of NVIDIA. Huang is an immigrant from Taiwan. He’d previously worked at the same Denny’s. Later he worked at semiconductor companies before founding NVIDIA. NVIDIA lacked a business plan. Still, Huang secured funding from Sequoia Capital. His former boss at LSI Logic recommended him. NVIDIA’s journey began with challenges, including layoffs. NVIDIA found success with the RIVA 128. Going public in 1999, NVIDIA saw a substantial stock surge by 2007. Forbes recognized NVIDIA for its impact on the gaming industry. The company’s GPUs later became crucial for AI research. Which would lead to breakthroughs in deep learning. NVIDIA has a strategic focus on R&D and expansion into diverse fields. This includes autonomous driving, computational biology, AI computing and data centers. Which contributed to its significant market capitalization and Huang’s substantial net worth. As of 2024, NVIDIA remains a leading force in technology innovation. Jensen Huang has ambitious plans for the future of computing.

The following is Methods of Prosperity newsletter number 43. It was originally deployed April 11, 2024. As of December 19, 2024, original subscribers have received up to issue number 79: Sam Zell (continued).

Part 43:

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• Discover something that no one else is working on that the market needs.

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There was no conventional way users searched for anything useful on the World Wide Web. In the early nineties, your expectations had to be low. Every search engine was like a mousetrap, designed more or less to keep users trapped. 

For example, two students at Stanford University launched Yahoo! Search in 1995. One of the first popular search engines on the web, it was actually a directory rather than a web crawler. Two former McKinsey & Company executives launched a web portal, Homebase in 1995. Reader’s Digest owned 80 percent of the company. Homebase rebranded to LookSmart in 1996.

Ask Jeeves was an early search engine, founded by two guys from Berkeley, California, in 1996. They launched it in 1997, and rebranded to Ask.com in 2006. A butler character named “Jeeves” responded to users’ questions. They created Jeeves to make search more conversational and user friendly. For a while, it was a novel solution to the clumsy process of searching for useful information. They actually employed human–powered editorial content. When a user asked a question that their primitive web crawler failed to retrieve, humans did the work.

One day, a PhD computer science student at Stanford University focused on a problem. Which web pages linked to a given page? The number and nature of such backlinks are valuable information for that page. Inventing an algorithm which he called PageRank, this is how it works. It counts the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. More important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. That’s the underlying assumption.

That student was Larry Page, future co-founder of Google. Larry Page was born on March 26, 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, USA. He was born to a Jewish mother named Gloria and a Protestant father named Carl. They were both professors at Michigan State University. When Larry Page was six years old, in 1979, his father brought home an Exidy Sorcerer computer. Which Larry soon mastered and began using for schoolwork.

“From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.” – Larry Page Quotation source: Scott, Virginia A. (October 30, 2008) [First published in 2008]. Google / Virginia Scott. Corporations That Changed the World. Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0313351273. ISSN 1939-2486. LCCN 2008030541. OCLC 234146408.

“You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning? I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking, what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links? And I grabbed a pen and started writing. Soon after, I told my adviser, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks for me to download the web. He nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer, but wise enough not to tell me.” – Larry Page in a speech to the 2009 graduating class of the University of Michigan.

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In 1995, Larry Page met a fellow PhD student named Sergey Brin. Sergey Brin was born on August 21, 1973 in Moscow, Soviet Union (now Russia). He was born to Russian Jewish parents, Mikhail and Eugenia Brin. They were both graduates of Moscow State University (MSU).

Prior to 1971, the Soviet Union denied Jews permission to emigrate. Primarily, the Soviet Union forbade them from fleeing to Israel, but also to the United States. The unofficial Russian term applied to those wanting to do so was refusenik. Any refusenik was in danger of losing their job, losing social status and being forced into menial work. They lifted the ban on Jewish immigration to Israel and the United States in 1971. Prejudices were slow to diminish.

In 1977, Sergey’s father decided it was time to leave the Soviet Union. He made this decision after attending a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland. Mikhail Brin applied for their exit visas in September 1978. His boss fired him from his job. Eugenia was also forced out of her job. The Soviets labelled them as refusenik. For eight months they struggled, until May 1979. The USSR granted their official exit visas and allowed them to leave the country.

While living in Vienna and Paris, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society supported them. Mikhail Brin secured a position. He became a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland. They arrived in the United States on October 25, 1979.

Sergey Brin attended a Montessori school, and graduated high school in Maryland. He received his Bachelor of Science from the Department of Computer Science in 1993. At the age of 19, he graduated from the University of Maryland. He graduated with honors in computer science and mathematics. That year, he landed an internship at Wolfram. He earned a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. He went on and studied computer science at Stanford University. There he met Larry Page during an orientation for new students.

Together, they started working on a project involving something they called “back links”. Page noticed that behind every web page there were thousands of other pages which linked to them. If a website had other websites linking to it, that provided a certain amount of credibility. What if that page links to many websites? It could receive a higher ranking than other pages with less websites linked to them.

In 1996, they started a research project called “Backrub” at Stanford. They designed Backrub to traverse the web. It could improve web search engines. Backrub ran on a variety of computers provided by Stanford’s Digital Library project. This included a Sun Ultra II, Pentium II servers, and an IBM RS/6000. It required a large amount of storage to crawl the web and analyze its link structure. Project Backrub grew in scale. At one point it consumed half of Stanford’s entire network bandwidth. This caught the attention of the computer science department and campus network administration. It was getting too big. Page and Brin realized that they needed to develop a more scalable search engine. It was time to build a better mousetrap.

To be continued…

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