The Googleplex

The Googleplex

  • Submitted By: DIANNE
  • Date Submitted: 12/07/2008 1:19 PM
  • Category: Business
  • Words: 480
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 571

Google Inc. has been one of the leading online search engines of all time for almost ten years now. Its history is self told as “lore,” and deserves nothing less. The company, as many technology ideas do, started in a garage. The company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin believed one of biggest challenges for the internet was retrieving relevant information from a massive set of data. In January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine. In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its (garage) door in Menlo Park, California with about 1 million dollars in self collected funds from a number of ventured capitalists. The staff of three hosted Google beta; answering ten thousand search queries each day, the upstart website began to get the press’s attention. By February 1999, the service was answering over five hundred thousand queries per day. Interest in the company grew, and on June 7, the company announced that it had secured a round of funding that included twenty five million dollars from the two leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Adding a full board of directors, and filling the necessary office positions for such a company, Google moved their operations to their current headquarters: “The Googleplex” in Mountain View, California. What had been a college research project was now a real company offering a service that was in great demand. Google, however, continued to make headlines due to the innovative management and corporate culture. To maximize the flexibility of the work space, large rubber exercise balls were repurposed as highly mobile office chairs in an open environment free of cubicle walls. While computers on the desktops were fully powered, the desks themselves were wooden doors held up by pairs of sawhorses. Lava lamps began sprouting like multi-hued mushrooms, while large dogs roamed the halls. A five star chef was hired for the café....