Believe it or not, Google was almost a pizza ordering service. If it wasn’t for one failed fax, we would all be using the search engine primarily for faxing orders to Pizza hut.
While they were grad students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and his friends decided that ordering pizza using the web would be a great idea. They developed the script and developed a program that would allow the user to place the order online. The program would then send a fax to the restaurant. When they never received their pizza because the restaurant never checked the fax machine, he killed that idea and went on to work with Co-Founder Larry Page to later develop Google.
The lesson learned by the failed fax experiment has been valuable to Sergey and he is still using those lessons while developing Google Glasses. In this “Solve for X” video, Sergey Brin gives a short talk about how Google came to be, the development cycle, and the importance of failure. Check out the video!
“When you go after a more ambitious goal, even if you failed to reach that one, all the side effects that come along the way, can be that much more rewarding and significant in their own right.-Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google
“Obviously you’re going to have failures. But it’s important to fail quickly”
