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Comment by bioh42_2 | Hacker News Reader

Larry Page's brother Carl Page had experience with venture capitalists, having sold eGroups to Yahoo for $432 million.

I did not know that.

I did know Bill Gates' mom was on the United Way executive committee with IBM's CEO.

I think these details are often omitted because we like to promote the idea that all you need is hard work and talent and perhaps a bit of luck to succeed.

We tend to not like stories about success as a function of familiar ties. This may have something to do with our distaste for monarchies and aristocracies.

It's also a bit depressing when you're working on a startup but no one in your family is well off, and no one is on a board with the CEO of a huge and potential partner, and your brother did not sell his startup for hundreds of millions.

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Think of it from Carl Page's perspective, then: his brother had not yet sold his startup for hundreds of millions.

Very nicely put!

A have-vs-have-not mindset can creep in easily and get you down on yourself before you've realized it. But so what if someone else has more advantages? I might not have a rich anyone or well-connected anyone to help me, but I have countless other advantages others don't have as well, that I should be thankful for, and work hard to make good on deserving them. Thanks for the reminder :)

You both make good points.

It is still amazing what they did with what they had, despite the fact that they had more than the average person.

However, there is no denying that they were lucky to have that money in the first place so that they could wait until their company was valued more and they had to give less away to VCs. I wonder how many startups had to give away their autonomy for badly needed cash? A large number no doubt.

From Carl Page's perspective: his brother had not yet sold his startup for hundreds of millions. It is quite a feat that he was able to do it by himself. But if Carl Page did have those hundreds of millions as a possible source of funding, could he have kept his startup from VCs longer and had more autonomy in it, and perhaps sold it for billions?

eGroups wasn't sold to Yahoo until August 2000 (after it IPO'd, actually), 2 years after Google was founded. Larry Page didn't have any more money available than any other Stanford grad student with a professor dad. He did have the experience of having a family member who'd gone through the VC process, but lots of people know people who've taken VC.

So true. I've often read interviews with founders and things get very vague around the "how did you pay bills before you had revenue" question. It becomes pretty clear that there was some family money, but it's not talked about since it takes away from the pure bootstrapped ideal. I wish there would be more honesty about it though, because it's still an amazing accomplishment to start a company, and it might help founders to get a more accurate picture of what's involved.

Agreed. The fact that Page and Brin were both smart and made many good decisions early (well, decisions that later seemed to pay off from them, which is approximately equivalent, but not exactly the same) was a major contributor. But I find it hard to believe that the fact that one of them had a brother who sold a business for $432 million did not help them significantly as well. In two ways: yes the connections, but also the fact you could potentially go to a brother rather than a total stranger and get millions of dollars to invest. Unlike a lot of current Lean/Agile/Web2.0 startups, Google couldn't exactly just rent computing nodes from EC2 at the time, they had to buy or build them, which costs lots of cash upfront. "Carl, remember that time I promised not to tell mom about who really broke her vase? I'm calling that in now."

Yeah it does remind me of Bill Gates a lot too. Smart guy, smart decisions, but also a family with wealth and powerful connections.

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