Monday, October 2, 2006

Google Buys Their Old Garage

AP reports that Google bought the garage where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin did some of their early (1998) work on the search engine. Actually, Google started out of Sergey’s Stanford dorm rooms, and the garage (by Susan Wojcicki, friend of Sergey’s girlfriend) was only added after Google received their first fundings for the company. From John Battelle’s The Search (page 86):

Wojcicki, a recently graduated MBA, had just purchased a five-bedroom house in Menlo Park, a suburb near the Stanford campus. She recalls being worried about covering her mortgage payments, and when Brin and Page offered to rent a spare room, she agreed. (...) Google Inc. – all three employees [with Craig Silverstein] – moved in the next day. (...)

Concerned about her privacy – Wojcicki was pregnant at the time – Wojcicki insisted that the new tenants enter their offices through the garage door. The newly minted entrepreneurs not only had seed capital; they could now claim the most shopworn cliché in the Valley – a garage address.

AP keeps hush about the exact location of the garage, as Google fears it could become swamped by even more tourists, but hints that “it can easily be found on the Internet using the company’s search engine.” Anybody knows the address?

[Via Spiegel.]

Update: French Google blog Zorgloob says the address is 232 Santa Margarita Ave, Menlo Park, CA. [Thanks Eric Lebeau!]

Google Buys Their Old Gar ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (4)

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