Biography | Larry Page and Sergey Brin — The Garage They Rented on Santa Margarita Avenue

The house at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue looks like any other in this quiet Menlo Park neighbourhood.

In September 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented its garage, and rooms inside the house, from Susan Wojcicki.

They paid about $1,700 a month.

Both were still graduate students at Stanford, a short distance away.

They had just incorporated Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 in California.

A $100,000 cheque from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, made out to the still-unformed company, had forced the paperwork.

The dorm rooms and campus servers could no longer hold what they were building.

Here the first production servers ran.

The search engine that began as BackRub now had a legal home and a physical one.

Craig Silverstein, the first employee, joined soon after.

Wojcicki later became an early Google employee herself.

Google bought the house in September 2006 for $1.245 million.

The company has kept it as part of its living history.

The building is private property and is not open to visitors.

From the street the garage door is still visible, ordinary and unchanged in its essentials.

That ordinariness is the point.

A company that would later measure its data centres by the gigawatt began in a two-car garage on a residential street.

Photo: Jordiipa, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons