Just
like Nike's Philip Knight, the success story of Larry Page started in a
research project required in his graduate class at Stanford University. According to Biography.com, together with Larry Brin,
Page “created a search engine that listed results according to the popularity
of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the
most useful”.
Biography.com further
wrote that “after raising $1 million from family, friends and other investors,
the pair launched the company in 1998. Google has since become the world's most
popular search engine, receiving an average of 5.9 billion searches per day in
2013.
Headquartered
in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, Google held its initial public
offering in August 2004, making Page and Brin billionaires overnight.
What’s
the secret of this 43-year old engineer and inventor who made Google what it is
today?
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| Larry Page Photo by Google |
In
a recent news report by Agence France-Press,
Google just wowed Wall Street when its shares rose from $93.08 to $672.93,
bringing the company’s full market value to about $468 billion and making it
the world’s second largest company, next to Apple.
What’s
more, the jump in share prices added about $4 billion more to his fortune, ensuring
his position at the top 25 of the world’s richest persons.
Does
Larry Page live by a success philosophy that brought him such fabulous wealth he
is now enjoying?
Of
course he does. Based on an interview with
Wired.com and reported in Business Insider Australia, here are some
beliefs and principles that guided him in making Google the world’s second most
valuable company.
1.
Innovations must be sold. He cited some famous companies such as Xerox
who led in creating big ideas and innovation but failed to sell those ideas to
the world. Another example is the breakthrough electric car Tesla that is still
struggling to get its electric cars out in the market.
2. Never mind competition. Most companies
today he said have fundamental problems in the way they are run – they are overly
competition-focused. The problem with this
mindset is that you don’t get amazing results or employees don’t get excited
when they are just out there to beat competition for piecemeal growth. He added that companies who just get
incremental growth decay over time, compared with those who create new and
interesting things.
3. We
have just scratched the surface. With what Google had done, revolutionizing
the way we access information, Page said it has only attacked 0.1 per cent of what technology
can do to improve people’s lives. As a
whole, the entire technology sector has only attacked one per cent. “That means
there’s 99 per cent virgin territory,” he says. There’s still more to be done. “If you’re not doing some things that are
crazy, then you are doing the wrong things”, he added.
4.
“Don’t
be evil”. Page believes that the
leaders of Google maintain their integrity and moral thinking, and make it part
of their corporate culture. Page says, “Our users trust Google’s objectivity
and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.” Page believed in doing things well and with
principle thus gaining the trust of the world.
5. Always deliver
more than expected. Page puts great importance on excellence. He preaches not just to do things but do them
well, better than anyone else and then beat your own record. With this mindset he believes that nothing
can stop one from succeeding.
6. Be
lean and mean. Page made it a policy
to do away with large bureaucratic structure that slows things down. “We don’t have as many managers as we should,
but we would rather have too few than too many” he said.
By and large, these wise words have
kept Page and Google up there in the NASDAQ scoreboards. This means that he must be doing things right.
At the end of the day, the real secret of
his success is the way he made the world a better place for all of us. He gave us instant access to the world’s
information.
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