Google's Start-Up

     Google Inc. has a very interesting story when it comes to their start-up as a company.  Similar to Facebook, they originated in college, Stanford University.  Two graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were both in the computer science department at Stanford and interesting in the way different web pages linked to one another.  With the internet and number of websites growing rapidly, they felt that it was a great topic to research further.  With the help of a few of their professors, they were given a research grant and quickly developed the PageRank data search algorithm.  Using Stanford's facities and equipment, they got an initial test-set of 24 million pages and used their data to write a research paper.
     By 1998, they had received another $10,000 grant, updated their computers and servers, moved everything into a friend's garage, and changed the project name to Google Inc.  Their algorithms and page design were both much better than existing search engines, so they were immediately successful and blown away by the success.  Because they were still students at Stanford when they created the algorithm and were working with the school's equipment, the two of them reached a licensing agreement with their university for rights to the algorithm.  The rest is history.  They blew up in the following years, their investors made enormous amounts of money, and Stanford benefited hugely as well.
     This is what is very interesting to me.  Even though Google's algorithms were created entirely by these two students, Stanford continues to benefit immensely from it.  1/3 of the license fees for Google's patents go to the Computer Science Department and another 1/3 to the school of engineering.  It is very interesting how schools can make so much money off of their students.  Many classes at Penn State involved students taking a course and giving actual proposals to companies such as Geico.  From what I understand, Geico pays Penn State fees to be able to use their students.  So the students pay to go to the school, the school makes money from the company, and the company gets work from the students.  The students also get very valuable work experience in many cases.  The relationship between a school and their students' work is really interesting.  It is understandable though that Stanford keeps making money off of Google because without Stanford, Google probably would never exist.  That is tough to imagine.  This link has some very interesting pictures and stats about the start-up of Google.