Google Garage

Many multinational tech companies had humble beginnings in small rooms or garages. One of the first was Hewlett-Packard, and not far from that is the garage where Steve Jobs started Apple. The founders of Google seemingly followed this pattern, starting in a garage that they rented from Susan Wojcicki. 

It is hard to imagine a world before Google, or without search engines in general. The web was much smaller, but still too big to map. People tried to remedy this by making so-called start pages, which collected links on various topics and displayed them in curated lists. All of this changed with the first search engines that started to appear in the early 1990s, as they made the net much more accessible to the people.

Arguably the most famous of these search engines is Google, a company started in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The duo rented a garage from Susan Wojcicki (now the CEO of Youtube) for $1,700 a month. While this sounds like a lot for a garage, it was in fact a steal for the Silicon Valley area, especially if you take into account how much the company made later. Google had just been incorporated when they moved into the garage, and Page and Brin had raised more than $1 million from investors.

Google was only based out of this suburban garage for about five months, but it has become an essential part of the company’s founding myth. In 2018, they recreated the garage in Google Maps, complete with old computers and junk in the corners.