Learn from others

I miss Mountain View, California. My family and I spend our yearly Christmas vacation  there, but which we have not done so for obvious reasons. I also miss Google and my Google friends; they would tour us around their campuses; and we would have lunch in their famous pantries.

Google’s rise is a fascinating story, rich with lessons we can apply to our business, life, and career. Not everyone can be a $2 trillion cap tech company. Still, the success principles that launched them there can enable a perpetual learner to find ideas to help them achieve positive results.

Two students from Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, noticed that popular search engines then like Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Excite were not providing relevant results and could be easily manipulated. They conceived Google, initially as a Ph.D. project, and presented a better search engine, so they came up with the ranking of a webpage in a search determined by how many other pages on the internet are linked to that page, thus proving that webpage’s credibility and authority. This algorithm was the basis of how the search engine would work. They patented it and called it PageRank. Then they offered to sell their patent to Excite for $1 million, but Excite’s CEO refused. Page and Brin reduced the selling price, but the CEO refused again. They had no option but to handle the business themselves, and that was when they registered the domain Google.com.

Andy Bechtolsheim from Sun Microsystems saw the potential of Google and gave them $100,000 as an initial investment. Google began hiring employees, and the product started gaining popularity. Other investors started putting money into it that exceeded the $1 million they were willing to sell it for. This time the founders decided to sell the company to Yahoo for $1 billion, and Yahoo refused. When the stock market crashed, investors were not interested in funding companies that showed no path to profitability, and Google at that time was not profitable. Left to themselves, they had to find a business model that could make money. And that was the time that Google came up with the idea of Google AdWords that enables advertisers to place text-based ads above search results. It was a game-changer. Even back then, in the early 2000s, hundreds of millions of searches done on Google provided a base of ad placements such that even a percentage of those would make a lot of money.

As a result, their revenue and their profits both grew massively. In 2004, Google was listed on the stock market, and today has become one of the biggest tech giants. As of 2021, under the new parent company, Alphabet Inc., which their founders created, Google has gone on to have a market cap of almost $2 trillion for a company that  started just some 20 years ago.

What lessons can we learn from this? The founders focused on innovation that delivers value. They saw a need in the market and provided a solution to fill in the need. Through this, they saw the importance of innovation and encouraged employees to spend 20 percent  of their working time creating innovative projects that would become future Google products.

Gmail and Google Maps are the results of this practice. This company learned from the mistakes of its competitors. When the founders offered the company to Excite for $1 million, the CEO did not see the company’s value and refused. When the company grew and was offered to Yahoo for $1 billion, perhaps the extenuating circumstance made it difficult for Yahoo to take the risk and refuse the offer.

From those experiences, Google learned the lesson, and in 2006 a new company was rising in popularity, but was not profitable. The company presented itself for sale. Google studied it carefully, recognized the potential of its products, and for a cool $1.65 billion, purchased YouTube.

YouTube alone earns billions for Google.

Not everyone can be as huge as Google, but everyone can constantly seek to innovate and improve themselves. The improved self now can solve problems, fill in needs, and create a promising future through their craft, profession or career.

We observe and learn from others. We study the success principles of those who have succeeded and evaluate and learn from others’ mistakes. Eleanor Roosevelt was right. She says: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” I am sure this is true. If not, then search Google.

(Connect with Francis Kong at www.facebook.com/franciskong2. or listen to “Business Matters” Monday to Friday 8 a.m. And 6:30 p.m. over 98.7 dzFE-FM’ The Master’s Touch,’ the classical music station.)