Background of the entrepreneurs

Lawrence Page

Lawrence Page or called as Larry Page was born at 26 March 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan, United States US. He is an Internet entrepreneur and American computer scientist who was co-founded of Google Inc. with Sergey Brin. Besides that, he is also the CEO of Alphabet Inc. which is Google's parent company. In August 2001, he was stepping aside as CEO in the favour of Eric Schmidt. After that, at April 2011 he re-assumed the role. July 2015, He had announced his intention to step aside for second time to become the CEO of Alphabet, under which Google's assets would be reorganized. Under him, Alphabet is seeking to deliver major advancements in variety industries. Google's best-known search ranking algorithm and PageRank was invented by him.

He met Sergey Brin while studying Master of Science in Computer Science at Stanford University which had assistance his created a search engine that returned results based on relevancy key words that entered. He and Brin launched a company under with the name Google Inc at 1998. They become the co-presidents until 2001 when Eric Schmidt was assigned as the CEO and Chairman of Google. In 2011, Eric Schmidt continues to serve as executive chairman and he officially became the CEO of Google. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the company. He interested in philanthropy and renewable energy technology. In 2004, Google.org was set up, it was the philanthropic branch of the company. It basically works with issues related to renewable energy and climate change.

He is a board member of the XPRIZE (X Prize Foundation) and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering at 2004. At 2004, he received the Marconi Prize.

In 2007, he married Lucinda Southworth at Necker Island. The island was owned by Richard Branson. Lucinda Southworth is a research scientist, the sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth. He and his wife having two children which born at year 2009 and 2011.Both of his parents Carl Page and Gloria was computer science professors. He also had a sibling called as Carl Victor Page.

In 1995, while he perusing his PhD at Stanford University, he met Brin while working on a research project. In 1996, they working together and built a search engine which initially called as ‘BackRub’. It was operated on the university servers for some months. They decided to incorporate their project as a company. Andy Bechtolsheim which is Sun Microsystems co-founder had played an important role in providing financing to the company. He wrote a $100,000 check for to the program that haven’t existence.

September 1998, the project was renamed as ‘Google’ and it was officially incorporated as a company. In 2001, Eric Schmidt was appointed as the CEO of the company. Lawrence Page and Brin respectively became the presidents of products and technology.

In 2004, Google had launched Orkut, it was a social networking site that introduce the Google Desktop search. Besides that, they become millionaires because of Google held its Initial Public Offering (IPO). Google.org was formed by Google to contribute social causes and issues.

In 2005, Google had released many products like Blogger Mobile, Google Maps, iGoogle and Google Reader. In 2006, Google had introduced chat feature on Gmail and acquired Youtube.

In 2007, Google had partnership with China Mobile and Salesforce.com. In order to make Google Apps for Education freely available to Rwanda and Kenya students, the company had signed partnerships.

In 2008, Google Sites was launched and new version of Google Earth by Google. Google Health also released at that year, it’s a centralization service that provide personal health information but the service was stopped at 2011 because it unable to achieve the desired features.

January 2009, Picasa for Mac was launched and continue with Google Latitude. The latest version of Google Earth released and Google Ventures was introduced at this year. Google Ventures is a venture capital fund for supporting new technology companies.

In 2010, Picnik and Aardvark was acquired by Google. The Google Apps Marketplace was launched make the customers easily manage the cloud applications. It was a online store for integrated business applications.

In January 2011, he became the CEO of Google. The former CEO Eric Schmidt, become the Executive Chairman of the company. In the view to provide better services to their user or customer, Google had acquired Zagat and Admeld.

18 February 2005, he had brought a 9000-sq ft Spanish Colonial Revival architecture house at Palo Alto, California. The house was designed by American artistic polymath Pedro Joseph de Lemos, which formerly curator of the Stanford Art Museum and founder of the Carmel Art Institute. The historic building had US$7.95 million asking price after it been on the market for years. A two story stucco archway with movement style was built to seem like de Lemos family's castle that located at Spain.  It features intricate stucco work, as tile and stone at the California Arts and Crafts and it spans the driveway. Around 1931 to 1941, the hacienda was constructed by de Lemos. It was on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 2009, he began purchasing properties and tearing down homes near to his home and make room for a large ecohouse at Palo Alto. The existing buildings was deconstructed and the materials was donated to reuse. "Minimize the impact on the environment" is the concept or slogan that used to design the ecohouse. He worked with an arborist to replace some poor health trees with others trees that used less water to maintain. With the no or low volatile organic compound (VOC) materials, points for use of recycled and roof garden with solar panels, he had applied for Green Point Certification. The house's exterior and some component of the house was features zinc cladding. Besides that, it also included some eco-friendly elements like pervious path through the trees on the property and permeable paving at the parking court. The size of the house is 6,000-sq ft which also had referenced other green home design features such as low volatile organic compound (VOC) paint and organic architecture building materials.

In 2011, he brought the 193-ft superyacht called as 'Senses' which cost around US$ 45 million. His superyacht was docked at Helsinki. The superyacht was equipped with a gym, helipad, 10 luxury suites, multi-level sun decks, 14 crew. The interior design of the superyacht was designed by famed French which is designer of Philippe Starck. It also has capabilities to explore large ocean. Besides that, it was developed or designed to explore world’s oceans and it can carry comprehensive inventory of equipment to full fill this ship capability. The superyacht was developed by Fr. Schweers Shipyard at their Berne shipyard that located in Germany.

May 2013, he had announced on Google+ post that his right vocal cord is paralyzed because of a cold that he contracted at the previous summer. In 1999, his left cord was paralyzed. He explained that he has been suffering from vocal cord issue for 14 years, from his May 2013 post, the exact cause of the problem still unable to identify by doctors. The Google+ post also revealed that he had donated a considerable sum of money to a vocal-cord nerve-function research program at the Voice Health Institute in Boston, U.S. The program was working at Massachusetts General Hospital, it was led by Steven Zeitels, the Eugene B. Casey Professor of Laryngeal Surgery. The donation was exceeded $20 million which stated by an anonymous source.

October 2013, Business Insider had reported that his paralyzed vocal cords are caused by Hashimoto's thyroiditis which is an autoimmune disease, and avoided him from undertaking Google quarterly earnings conference calls for an indeterminate period.

November 2014, his family foundation, the Carl Victor Page Memorial Fund, reportedly holding assets in excess of a billion dollars at the end of 2013. $15 million had gave to aid the effort against the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. He wrote on his Google+ that stated "My wife and I just donated $15 million.... Our hearts go out to everyone affected."

The skills and competencies that contribute to the entrepreneurs’ success

Pay attention to your crazy ideas and cultivate the best of them

“Talk about the future” is the word that told by Lawrence Page at University of Michigan’s engineering graduates in 2005 and that time Google had 3,500 employees, one-eighth as many as it does now.

Audacious ideas were one of the concept that he urges his teams to believe in. In 2009, he said at the Google Faculty Summit, “by tackling big ideas that could really change the world, you attract incredibly smart people and achieve something worthwhile, even if it’s not your original goal”. The Google group researching artificial intelligence instead of came up with the advertisement targeting system, which accounts for almost half of revenues.

The Google’s search engine idea was came to him in a dream about downloading the entire web and keeping the links, he told Michigan graduates. He said “When no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition”.

“He is very engaged in what challenges people face and his engineering brain often kicks in”, says Grady Burnett. Grady Burnett is the one that led Google’s AdWords office for five years in Ann Arbor and currently work for Facebook.

Build your team, avoid bureaucracy

For years, in every hire at Google, he insisted to being involved. At his early hires, most of the graduates was from Stanford University or University of Michigan. Co-founder Sergey Brin and him was met while in graduate school. When some of them want left and establish their own companies, most of them have stuck around because of his approach. Some people had recently promoted to lead Google’s major product divisions which among the first 10, so employees the company hired, dating back to 1998.

Steven Levy said “It’s remarkable”, he is the author of the recently published book in Plex, a look inside Google. “Those people are rich enough to buy anything and they’re still working, committing to a few more years” with the company. Levy said “It’s a belief in Larry”, he is a senior writer for Wired.

Lawrence Page was quietly reassigning or cutting middle management and bureaucracy while he and his recruiters continue to look of thousands bright young graduates to join Google. The company was recent reorganization and reinforces that notion.

Levy who had interviewed him around six times said that “he has a problem with traditional management. He doesn’t like it”.

Be quick. Be concise

He is working to cultivate a nimbler and faster management in Google which had employed about 26,000 people around the world. According to the Wall Street Journal, he has asked his staff to give him about 60 words updates on their current projects that the holding.

Besides that, he also looking to encourage faster openness and decisions. Top executives are asked to sit around together for one day per week which is the time for quick choices and collaboration. 

According to the San Jose Mercury News, he looking to encourage the immediacy-minded attitude that prevails at YouTube.

Recognize the significance of small moves

Google’s staff always improve their products by adding new features and improving the usability of Gmail, Android and their search engine, they always improvise and improve every time. He told that he gets “a new build” on his Android phone every day to an audience in Europe. “It continues to work better and better every day.”

Google also focused on connecting with the students, staffs and user base. Most of satellite offices was located at the college towns across the country. In metro Detroit, they have offers classes at colleges and high schools in order to teach them how to use AdWords for charities and non-profits.

Bud Gibson said “We’re training the 21st Century workforce, and making a significant impact on local Michigan nonprofits”. He is a professor of computer information systems at Eastern Michigan University.

Even if the students never been in the Googleplex headquarters, they also can use the skills to join a Web 2.0 company and try more use of Google products.

Small steps might bring some improvement and big rewards to the Google’s reputation. They more focus on making the Google’s products become more user-friendly to the users.

Persevere

For Google’s book digitization project, its take about six years for him to get staff and work on it. When he and Brin was students at Stanford, he came up with this idea. The first books were scanned at year 2004.

Besides that, it also took few years to launch Google Maps with Street View. In 2009, he told the Google Faculty Summit that “I had the camera in my car and took a bunch of video”. He keeps convincing himself it would work and kept working on convincing others after convincing himself.

Around 1993, he joined the Michigan Solar Car Team and showed that he interested in alternative fuel cars. Currently Google is working on robotic car that can drives itself and adding information on where to recharge electric cars on its maps. The people that come out with this idea was expect him to continue launch it no matter the amount of payoff.

The book project has been targeted by authors and publishers which state the project gives Google big advantage over competitors and infringes on their copyrights, this might test his perseverance. About end of March, Google’s proposed settlement was rejected by the federal judge and saying that it would might give Google significant rights to exploit the entire books without the permission of the copyright owners.

Lessons he can stand to learn

He has to offer all the leadership lessons and certainly has some lesson he still must be master. He has to communicate more with others, either to Google’s partners, the media and others. Levy said “If you’re the CEO, you’ve got to be communicating more to the outside world.”

He might paid a huge amount of money for this particular quality. One day, after his earnings announcement the Google stock declined more than 8%. This happen because he didn’t hold Q&A (Question and Answer) session with investors at a post-earnings conference call.

In order to dealing with adversity, especially related to government anti-trust regulators, he may need some lesson. Besides from the book project suit and others, he might not really able to grappled with too many obstacles until now.

After that, Google reported a 17% increase in quarterly with net income up to $2.3 billion from the previous year but missed the forecasts from Wall Street’s. The company also said that they were going up to hire 6,200 new staffs and become the largest hiring spree in its 13 years history.

His approach and optimism to leadership are worthy of imitation by everyone.

The achievement of the entrepreneur

Google had been praised as Top 100 Search Engines and Web Sites at 1998 by PC Magazine. In 1999, it also been awarded the Technical Excellence Award for Innovation in Web Application. In 2000, Webby Award and People's Voice Award for technical achievement was earned by Google. In 2001, it was awarded Best Image Search Engine, Outstanding Search Service, Best Design, Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards and Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine. In 2002, Lawrence Page was named by World Economic Forum as Global Leader for Tomorrow. Along with Brin, he was named by the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Technology Review publication as one of the top 100 innovators around the world that under 35 age, as part of its yearly TR100 listing, after 2005 it changed to "TR35".

In 2003, IE Business School given a MBA (Master of Business Administration) to Lawrence Page and Brin in an honorary capacity, "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses.". In 2004, they were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University and also received the Marconi Foundation's prize. John Jay Iselin which is the Foundation's president had congratulated them for "their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." while announcing their selection. In 2003, for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award, they were also get Award Recipients and National Finalists.

In 2004, Lawrence Page was chose by X PRIZE as a trustee of their board and he was elected the National Academy of Engineering. In 2005, Lawrence Page and Brin were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2008, in the Princess of Asturias Awards, he received the Communication Award from King Felipe on behalf of Google. In 2009, the University of Michigan give him an honorary doctorate during a graduation commencement ceremony. In 2011, on the Forbes list of billionaires, he was ranked 24th and become the 11th richest person in the US. In 2015, Google is "the most influential company of the digital era." was stated in his "Powerful People" profile on the Forbes site.

July 2014, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index had listed him as the 17th richest man in the world and estimated net worth of $32.7 billion. At the end of 2014, he had named as "Businessperson of the Year" and declaring as "the world’s most daring CEO" by Fortune magazine. In October 2015, he was named number one in Forbes' "America's Most Popular Chief Executives" with the vote by its employees.