Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally wanted Google to be a pay-to-use service and were against ads. I don't know how they came to their change in business model, but I suspect it was after they hired people that weren't engineers to help.
Schmidt joined Google in March 2001. For all of 1999 Google only had $220,000 in revenue (founded Sept 1998). Their early, primitive experiments in advertising worked well enough, they brought in $19m in revenue for 2000 (which would increase 300% in 2001, and then 400% in 2002).
[1] 2013: https://slate.com/business/2013/10/googles-big-break-how-bil...
[2] 2005: https://www.gq.com/story/google-larry-sergey
> Schmidt met all of Larry and Sergey's stringent criteria. He had a credible name, a Ph.D. (from Berkeley), and he promised not to push the boys aside or dismantle the quirky culture they'd engendered. "The board members told me, basically, 'Don't screw this thing up!' " Schmidt says. "They said, 'It needs some infrastructure, some growing, but the gem here is very real.'"
Has there been another company since Google that grew so fast? $19mil revenue in 2yrs, then tripling and quadrupling.
Slack - 3 years Twilio - ~5 years ServiceNow - 6 years Shopify - 7 years
They had $583 million in sales for 1983. $1.5 billion in today's dollar. They hit basically $1b the next year, at $982 million for 1984 (in 1984 dollars). Inflation adjusted I'm guessing they hit the $1 billion mark at about six years in business.
I similarly recall that Compaq grew extremely fast. Dell's liftoff followed a similar trajectory (the start was a bit slower, due to how Michael Dell started the company).
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GRPN/groupon/reven...
Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements. Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors. As one Google executive quoted by Zuboff put it, “Larry [Page] opposed any path that would reveal our technological secrets or stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-ho...
For years, they required that all their hires could program, even those in completely unrelated roles.