“We are entering a possibly unpredictable time for search.” Ari Ramkilowan, Helm

Google started by accident. In 1996, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then students at Stanford University, created a solution to a problem among search engines: they could index information, but they were bad at ranking their results. The answer was PageRank, a logic system that ranked web pages according to how many other sites linked to them (backlinks), thus suggesting they are popular.

The pair and Stanford offered to sell this new technology to search engines such as Yahoo! and AltaVista for the princely sum of $1 million. They didn’t find any buyers. Page and Brin dropped out to start their own company. Less than a decade later, they had fortunes of over $10 billion each.