Friday, December 8, 2006

Brin Interview From Six Years Ago

This quote from Google Co-founder Sergey Brin in 2000 is kinda funny in retrospect... now that the company has thousands of employees (my emphasis):

Probably the most difficult part has been learning to deal with organizational challenges. We have over 70 people right now. When it was just a few people it was fine. There weren’t any really complicated issues. Now we have a much more complicated yeast

Other highlights:

• Yahoo was considered no competitor (don’t they say the same about Microsoft now?)
• “We don’t want to be building out lots of services” (mission not accomplished)
• A name for the search engine Brin and Co. considered before deciding on “Google” was “Whatbox” (but it sounded too much like “Wetbox”, which sounded too much like porn; WhatBox.com is taken since 1998, by the way)

[Via Digg. The interview was done by John F. Ince, and the audio version is supposed to be released on Monday.]

Also see this (unrelated) video interview with Sergey in 2000 [WMV] by Net Cafe/ Archive.org.

Brin Interview From Six Y ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

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