Just as Sergey was fascinated by Richard Feynman, Larry was inspired at age twelve by a biography of Nikola Tesla, whose pioneering work led to the development of electricity, power grids, X-rays, and wireless communication. Tesla was an extraordinary but unsung scientist, an Edison without the fame or wealth and who, despite his discoveries, died bitter and destitute. Page told me he learned from Tesla that “you can invent the world’s greatest things, but if you just invent them it doesn’t accomplish that much… I found it very sad. You can imagine if he were slightly more skilled in business, or with people, he’d have gotten a lot more done.” Brilliant ideas alone would not suffice. Timing and follow-through, and raising resources, really mattered.

“I realized I wanted to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world,” Page once said. He became convinced that in order to effect scientific change he needed to start a business. Inventing things, he once said, “wasn’t any good; you really had to get them out into the world and have people use them to have any effect. So probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.” When he thought about the kind of company he wanted, Larry told me, he thought of his grandfather, an assembly-line worker in the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, who during sit-down strikes fearfully carried a heavy iron pipe wrapped in leather as protection from what he described as strike-breaking “goons.” Happy employees, Larry came to believe, are more productive.

The rival for Larry’s attention was music. He had begun playing the saxophone as a child, and he played with considerable skill. After finishing his first year at East Lansing High School, Larry was among the talented musicians chosen to attend summer sessions at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan. But the lure of engineering soon triumphed over music. Like his father, mother, and brother, Larry enrolled at the University of Michigan. He didn’t have much choice. “My dad actually said to me when I was deciding what school to go to, ‘We’ll pay for any school you want to go to-as long as it’s Michigan,”’ he once said.

With his short dark hair and stark black eyebrows and 5 o‘clock shadow, he looked like Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, but his high-pitched voice made him sound like Kermit the Frog. He remained an introvert while studying engineering at the university. Nevertheless, he imagined that one day he might start a company, and insisted on taking business courses. He also stood out; a brilliant student, he served as president of Eta Kappa Nu, a national honor society for electrical and computer engineering students. Preoccupied with finding more efficient ways to do things, he led a still nascent effort to build a monorail that would replace forty buses to connect the North and the Central Campus. He attended a leadership training program at the university, where he encountered a slogan he would often repeat as an adult: “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

For his graduate studies, he had his heart set on Stanford, a university where even the names of the buildings attest to the men whose careers were spawned there: William R. Hewlett, David Packard, Jerry Yang, James Clark. Yet for all of his ambition and achievements, he feared he was not up to the task. “I kept complaining to my friends that I was going to get sent home on the bus,” he once told Michigan ’s alumni magazine. “It didn’t quite happen that way.”

THE STANFORD CAMPUS, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, is spread over eight thousand acres. Like the Google campus that Page and Brin would one day build, Stanford offers free bus service, plentiful food, a bucolic setting, and shared spaces where students can collaborate. By the time Larry arrived in 1995, Sergey had been there two years; he was on the orientation team that welcomed Larry to campus. Sergey, as was his wont, immediately began needling Larry with questions. “We argued a lot,” recalled Brin, mostly about local zoning and city planning. The field didn’t particularly interest Brin, but arguing did. “We ended up talking a lot.” The other students were content to tour San Francisco; Larry and Sergey were curious about other things. Even today, their idea of a relaxing time is to attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show and ask questions about the cool new technologies on display, or quiz astronauts about space flight.

Larry found an academic mentor in Terry A. Winograd, a computer science professor who had won a National Science Foundation grant to explore the future of online information. Larry bolted upright one night from a dream, he said many years later when describing how he suddenly had a vision for search. “I was thinking: What if we could download the whole Web, and just keep the links… I grabbed a pen and started writing!” He told Professor Winograd, “It would take a couple of weeks to download the Web.” Winograd nodded, he said, “fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me.” Larry downloaded the entire link structure of the Web, not quite knowing what he’d do with it. He realized that links weren’t organic; they were the result of conscious effort. In a sense, users were voting for the best links when they chose to visit a site, or when they included a link on their own site. He had a bold idea to craft a different kind of search engine that would use these links to catalogue not just an island of the Web but the entire ocean.

His new friend Sergey was intrigued. He had been working with computer science professor Rajeev Motwani on data mining for the Web, still a nascent field in which one had to collect links, print them out, and study the printout to derive answers. The audacity of Larry’s effort appealed to him. The math problems-how to count not just the original page links but the links affixed to the links-were the kind of challenge he tackled with gusto. “It was,” Brin said, understatedly, “an interesting source of data.” Sergey signed on, and the two became inseparable; when speaking of them, colleagues began to roll their names together, LarryandSergey.

The two were working at the dawn of the digital age. In 1993, two years before Brin and Page met, a mere fifteen million people in fifty countries used the Internet, and there were just over one hundred Web sites. The Mosaic browser had just been introduced, and Linus Torvalds empowered a community of software hackers to produce the open-source operating system called Linux. But the digital world was moving at breakneck speed, with the Internet doubling in size every year. In 1995, just two years later, Yahoo was born, and its major online competitor, AOL, had nearly five million subscribers; the Mosaic browser had been renamed Netscape Navigator the prior year, and did for the Internet what Lewis and Clark did to open the West.

Mighty Microsoft was late to spot the menace Netscape and the Internet posed to its packaged software business. Microsoft’s misreading of the Internet threat is conveyed in a sixteen-page November 15, 1994, memo to Bill Gates from Myhrvold deriding the “hype” surrounding the Internet, and asserting-just as dismissively as Sumner Redstone was that same year in his speech to the National Press Club-that it was just a distribution platform dominated by “hobbyists.” Although Myhrvold presciently warned of the advent of a Web browser, Microsoft was slow to comprehend the impact of the Netscape browser, which liberated consumers from behind the walls AOL and other portals erected, allowing them to surf the Web. When Microsoft finally reacted, it was not tentative. Bill Gates galvanized his troops with a May 1995 memo, “The Internet Tidal Wave,” warning of this disruptive technology.

The year 1995 was also when a Morgan Stanley analyst named Mary Meeker teamed up with a fellow analyst, Chris DePuy, to author The Internet Report, a thick volume that heralded a brave new world. “In this report,” they wrote on page one, “we attempt to describe what may be one of the hottest new markets to develop in years-the growth of PC-based communications and the Internet.” They said the “market for Internet-related products and services appears to be growing” faster than such early media start-ups as printing, telephones, movies, radio, recorded music, television. With a multiplying base of about 150 million PC users, they predicted e-mail “should become pervasive,” and the Internet would serve as “an information distribution vehicle” for companies, slashing costs, birthing new competitors-“the next Microsofts, Ciscos, Oracles, and Compaqs…”