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Google's early success was much about the supportive environment for founding a company, not the academics: networking with investors and early hires, getting r

by trhtrsh 14y ago

Google's early success was much about the supportive environment for founding a company, not the academics: networking with investors and early hires, getting recommendations from influential professors, than it was about the "PhD project" of PageRank. It was a standard graph algorithm executed on the Internet, not a ground-breaking academic project. (Obviously -- they left school before they did much any work on PageRank) If PageRank were a new idea now, Google.com could have come up through YC.

rayiner 14y ago
It's not that simple and they did a prototype and published a paper before they left Stanford (three years in). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. It was conceived as a "citation graph of the web" based on theoretical work in that area: http://web.archive.org/web/20020506051802/www-diglib.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/WP/get/SIDL-WP-1997-0072?1 http://web.archive.org/web/20020506051802/www-diglib.stanfor.... You say that today they could've come up through YC. I'm not sure that's true. Would they have the necessary grounding in those "standard graph algorithms" if they had just come straight to YC (or bearing in mind Stanford undergraduates benefit tremendously from the graduate program--skipped college entirely?) I think you're downplaying the interaction of study and invention here.