Hisham Sarwar
Google just completed 21 years a couple of months back. The journey of over 2 decades has an amazing story not many know about.
It is a story of believing in yourself, hard work and innovation, and despite horrendous, fierce competition; today Google is one of the power symbols of the internet and its search engine is one-stop-shop all over the world — well, excluding China but it does not matter a bit.
In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to sell Google for $750,000. Google was willing to sell for under a million dollars to another internet giant “Excite” but the company did not buy them.
Excite CEO George Bell rejected Page and Brin’s $ one million-selling price for acquiring Google. Later, Google co-founders even lowered their price and offered to sell Google for $750,000 but the Bell still declined the offer.
As of the latest figures, the company has over 103,500 employees. The company is now known as Alphabet Inc.
Larry Page’s net worth is 59.5 billion USD in 2019 while the other co-founder’s network stands at 57.4 billion USD in 2019.
Today, their combined stake in the company is worth $125 billion and they wanted to sell Google for under one million at the very beginning of their company’s operations.
Today, Alphabet has a market value of $863.2 B with a profit of whooping $30.7 B in 2019, according to a Forbes report.
The story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin gives us a lot of lessons.
It embarks upon the statement that nothing replaces hard work, perseverance, and innovation. Google is just a perfect example of innovation. Not only did it toppled the search engine giants such as Overture, Yahoo, Excite and many others but also innovated, progressed and moved forward by introducing many different services, Google phone, Maps just to name a couple and the list of services just never ends today and continuing to grow further.
The co-founder wanted to sell the company because the beggings of any start-up are always tough. Maintaining momentum requires vision, facing challenges but with hard work, you can pull off unthinkable milestones.
Moral of the story:
Never give up on yourselves. A winner is a loser who just tried one more time. Larry and his partner Sergey surely did and rest is the history.
Disclaimer: Picture credits unknown
