Rust Valley

According to the entire Interwebs, and more specifically this article at the Guardian, Google celebrates their 10th birthday this month. Sometime. Like maybe the 7th, or maybe the 13th.

In reality, Google is either 10 or 11 or 13 years old depending on how you count. The press is making a reasonably big deal about this confusion because they like simple stories: ‘Google was incorporated on 7 September, 1998′ or the like. But companies don’t start that way. Someone has a set of ideas. They talk to other people and refine/improve/change those ideas. They try out some of those ideas. Most of them fail. Some succeed. Eventually it gets to the point where it might have real promise. So then they register a domain name (this actually comes before the first idea sometimes).

At some point people look at each other and say: ‘Dude, we should probably register a Delaware corporation and make this thing a real company.’ The press likes to talk about that last date, but the other dates are usually much more important in the gestation of a company. Like a human fetus, it takes a while to be fully cooked.

I find it fairly refreshing that Google refuses to take any particular part of this all that seriously. Starting a company is a process and celebrating a company should really be geared around when the current employees of the company “feel like having cake.” In any case, Mabrook, google. Felicidades. Congratulations. Well done.