Google X Sergey’s story: “Not many people know that the […]

Google X

Sergey’s story: “Not many people know that the founding of Google depended on the failure of a fax.

Back in college, I wanted to use the web to order a pizza, back before they took online orders. So I wrote a fax script to order pizza on the web.

It was much easier back then, just 20 lines of Perl script. Web programming is beyond me now, I’m afraid.

Well, the pizza did not arrive, and we got hungrier and hungrier. So I called the pizza shop, and they said let me check. They did not get the order. So I told them I faxed it in. “Oh, we don’t check the fax machine.”

Then I knew this won’t work. If restaurants with fax machines won’t look at the fax, that idea failed. So I went on to meet Larry and we got into data mining and the link structure of the web. It was very lucky for me, actually that the fax did not go through. I might have put a lot of energy into online ordering of pizza. It’s part of the randomness of life.

And I learned the value of fast development cycles. It’s important to fail quickly, like that first fax not going through.

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With Google Glass, we built a new physical prototype every month for a sustained seven-month design cycle. Those rapid iterations made a huge difference.”