I assumed that was your line of reasoning but probably is a big word here. I don't think it's something you can really know in that it's finding proof in a neg

I assumed that was your line of reasoning but probably is a big word here. I don't think it's something you can really know in that it's finding proof in a negative, such as when a doctor says to a patient, "The tests didn't find cancer -- you're cancer free!" If Larry and Sergey had done their post-graduate work in Moldova, the world wouldn't have Google. (Remember they shopped Page Rank to places like Yahoo, who didn't want it. As an idea, no one believed in it.) The connections at Stanford gave them access to capital which they otherwise would not have had, which allowed them to prove the concept. Without that funding, Page Rank would be just another dissertation.