So in 1998 they secured a first round of funding, rented office space, and set out to run the company themselves, with Larry Page as CEO.īy 1999, Google was a thriving company. They weren’t looking for much money: $1m would have likely done the trick. But both students wanted to complete their Ph.D.s, so they tried to sell the software to several established web companies in 1997. It worked better than Page and Brin had anticipated, and they immediately saw the commercial value in the program. The first version of the search engine software was a hit. In true Silicon Valley form, Page and Brin worked tirelessly on the project, often forgoing sleep, personal hygiene, and anything resembling a social life. His friend and fellow graduate student Sergey Brin wrote a program that analyzed, summarized, and catalogued web site content in one place to make it easier for Page’s program to search. Page felt that a better search engine would rank pages according to what other sites linked to it and use that page ranking in addition to keywords in a complex algorithm in order to find the most relevant search results. The most popular engine at the time, Altavista, used keywords alone to determine relevance. In 1995, Page was a Stanford graduate student with an idea to build a better search engine. Perhaps one of the most interesting examples of a leadership failure and subsequent comeback success is the story of the history of Google and its co-founder Larry Page. So I’ve started collecting stories about the failures of successful people, as a reminder that if you’re making mistakes and learning from them, you’re actually on the path to success. Once we realize that our heroes are just like us, we can examine how failure drives success. Failure is a humbling exercise, both for the observer and the observed. Our heroes need to be held to the same standard as the ancient Greek gods: awesome but not infallible. We know this about ourselves but even as we learn to accept our own failures, sometimes we don’t recognize that the most successful people in the world have had an abundance of failure. It is through failure that these individuals were able to learn, grow and ultimately succeed. But each of them failed epically and repeatedly, more so than the combined successes of all of humanity.įailure should not be overlooked in anyone, especially not those we admire. Certainly, we remember these individuals as successes-success stories-and we treat those stories as legends and those individuals as gods. The greatest people in history have been failures.
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