Nowadays, we use Google every day, and everyone has heard of it. They are a giant $800 billion tech company and employ around 90,000 people – but they weren’t always that big.
In fact, their humble beginnings 20 years ago this month can tell us a lot about how we can take something small and make it amazing.
Google when it began as a new internet startup, the whole company was just its two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and they worked out of a garage!
It sounds pretty impossible to believe, right? But you can take a virtual tour of what that garage looked like in 1998, via a new virtual tour posted online by Google on Thursday.
The images are titled "Susan's Garage," named after Susan Wojcicki, who rented the garage of her Menlo Park, California home to the founders.
Check it out in street-view and you’ll see a wooden work bench and a 20-year-old desktop computer with a beta version of Google's original logo and homepage pictured. There are also a lot of stacked cardboard boxes, exposed wires, heating ducts, a washer-dryer, and a beer bottle. As you might expect at a start-up operated out of someone’s home garage.
Of course, Google has long since stopped operating out of any garage. They have a presence all over the world, and in California, they now have an office complex in Mountain View, a 2 million square-foot headquarters, and houses 20,000 employees.
Rent and startup costs are prohibitive for a lot of us, and it may be a reason we don’t start working on that idea that can be a big hit in a few years. But this is a sign of what we CAN do: Think out of the box, find ways to make it work, and it’s impossible to say just how much you’ll be capable of.
Two men holding certificates