Chapter Three - The Startup That Ate the Internet

CHAPTER THREE

The Startup That Ate the Internet

BY 1999, GOOGLE had moved out of the garage.
The company was scaling fast, faster than they’d planned.
Users were spreading the gospel of clean, accurate search like it was a religion.

No ads.
No clutter.
Just results.

While competitors like Yahoo! and AltaVista spammed the screen with flashing banners and pop-ups, Google was austere. White space, a logo, and a blinking cursor.

People noticed.

Traffic exploded.

So did costs.

Enter the VCs.

In stepped Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, two of the most powerful venture firms in Silicon Valley. They each threw in $12.5 million.

But they wanted something in return.

Structure.
Leadership.
Adult supervision.

So Google brought in Eric Schmidt, a veteran executive from Novell, as CEO. Larry and Sergey were still in charge, but now they had a suit in the room.

The founders didn’t love it.

But they understood it.

If Google was going to become more than a great search engine, if it was going to scale into something world-shaking, they needed someone who could run a machine this big.

And it was getting big.

Then came the ads.

They called it AdWords.Aa way for companies to buy small, text-only ads that showed up when people searched for specific things.

It was genius.

Targeted.
Efficient.
Non-invasive.

And wildly profitable.

Google was no longer just a search engine.
It was now an advertising empire, printing money with every click.

But the real secret?
They weren’t just indexing websites.

They were indexing you.

Every search.
Every typo.
Every question you whispered into the void at 3 a.m.

Google was watching.

Not because they were evil, of course not.

They were just optimizing the user experience.

Right?

So they kept building.
Kept growing.

But the line between “organizing the world’s information” and controlling it was getting thinner by the day.