Google Started As a Dream. What’s Yours?

Google Co-Founder Larry Page was back here in Ann Arbor this past weekend to deliver the commencement speech at the University of Michigan.

I never knew that the “link graph” concept behind Google started as a dream. According to Page, he awoke one night and scribbled down some ideas. The story was motivational and interesting. More importantly, the long-term implications have yet to be fully realized.

You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning?

Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

The passage above appears begins at 5:45 in this video: