In fact, if you’re tech-savvy [note: Paul uses this word broadly, not necessarily in the IT context], it’s easy to come up with startup ideas. If you’re good at a technology, you look at the world and see dotted lines around the missing pieces. You begin to see both what’s missing in the technology itself and all the broken things it can fix, and each of these is a potential startup.
There’s a store near our house with a sign warning that the door is tight. That sign has been there for several years. The people in the store must think it’s a mysterious natural phenomenon that the door is stuck, and all they can do is put up a sign warning customers about it. But any carpenter looking at this situation would think, “Why don’t you just plane off the part that’s causing the friction?”
—from the March essay “How to Start Google”
The same is true for Google. Larry and Sergey weren’t trying to start a company at first. They were simply trying to improve search. Before Google, most search engines didn’t bother sorting the results they returned. If you searched for “rugby,” you’d just get every web page containing the word “rugby.” And in 1997, the web was so small that this actually worked! Well, sort of. There might only be 20 or 30 pages with the word “rugby,” but the web was growing exponentially, meaning this search method was becoming increasingly broken. Most users simply thought, “Wow, I’m definitely going to have to sift through a lot of search results to find what I want.” The door slammed shut.
