From the Dorm room to the Garage. From the Garage to the Googleplex.

For some months, I’ve been thinking of how to impact young entrepreneurs, most especially Africans. I’ve always wanted to change the narrative, hence I’ve decided to cook sessions and programs that are value-filled and that every young mind can benefit from. I started some sessions, one of it is the skull sessions where I interviewed young minds who are doing well in their fields.

I kick-started another one last week, it is all about sharing and explaining how big brands started - the challenges, principles, culture, values, founders, and lessons to pick from the big brands. I started with google, as my first case study. The journey from The dorm room to The Garage and from The Garage to The Googleplex is something to learn from and here are the lessons I learned from the story:?

1. There is a high tendency that you become something/someone close to what your environment looks like. The founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are both tech-oriented right from scratch and they leveraged the opportunity. Larry’s father was one of the first recipients of a computer science degree from the University of Michigan. His mother was a database consultant with a master’s in computer science. Sergey's mother was a scientist at NASA and his father a maths lecturer at the University of Maryland. So, they are both exposed to computers right from childhood.

2. You must share the same passion and vision with your partner. Though the founders never wanted to start a business or company right from the inception, their bond was greatly fueled by their shared love of academics debate and discourse. They both wanted to write a killer thesis which was the main reason why Google was birthed.

3. You must always see the bigger picture, and be convinced there is a better way to solve a problem. Prior to creating their first search engine, Backrub which was later renamed Google, Yahoo, and Alta Vista have solved the problem they wanted to solve, Yahoo employed a team of editors to assemble a web directory and was already struggling to keep up with the mushrooming web.?Larry and Sergey conducted research and they arrived at the hypothesis, that the number of links pointing to a site is a measure of its popularity. Furthermore, they decided that links could be weighted.

4. The place of mentorship and funding cannot be overemphasized. During the research, Larry studied the leading search engine, Alta Vista. He downloaded the entire web on his computer to study the relevance of web links which Alta Vista didn’t appear to be taking into account. The project took longer than expected and cost the computer science department around $20,000 every time they sent out a crawler program to capture online data - but the effort was definitely worth it.

5. A “No”, or rejection should not make you give up, rather it is a driving force, a force to do more. Coming from backgrounds where academia was revered, the two founders never had the mind to go into business, they were more excited to have stumbled across the basis of a killer thesis than to start a company. But rejection made them do that. They wanted to sell the product, and search engine to the leading companies then, but they said NO. They passed on the opportunity which left them with the only option to take the product to the market themselves. They did and they are successful now.

6. Idea does not come fully formed, it only becomes clearer as we work on it- Mark Zuckerberg. The founders had no good business model when they started, but they had zealous fervor. They did not know what the journey would look like, but they took the first brave step. They knew they have a good product, the feedback showed that their idea is valid and they are solving a pain point and they continued till they fully see what they want the company to look like.

7. Feedback is the food to the growth of every business/company. By amassing email feedback from their academic peers, the founders refined their product before seeking funding to make it scalable. They eventually raised $100,000 - invested by Andy Bechtolsheim. At this point, they incorporated the company, and Google was finally born.

8. Practice the lean strategy as much as you can. Instead of spending so much on marketing after their first fundraising, they rather improved their product, give their customers a better experience, and leveraged word-of-mouth marketing.

9. Get a patent. Beware of patents. Shortly before they declare the initial public offering (IPO), a number of factors coincided to bring down Google's share price. One is, that the company had to deal with the backlash from rivals. Overture, a subsidiary of its largest competitor, Yahoo!. Overture pioneered the idea of selling ads to accompany search results using a pay-per-click model and accused Google of infringing its patents. Conscious of the negative effect the ongoing legal battle was having in the run-up to its stock market debut, Google's founders gave Yahoo! 2.7 million shares in an out-of-court settlement.

10. Success is the real proof and no one else will prove it if you refused to. Aside from the patent issue they had with Overture, Google went through faced some other difficulties. At the height of its success in 2007, shares in Google were being sold for $741.80, but its price began to tumble amid fears that its ad revenue was falling (newspapers reported fewer people were clicking on its ads). But, true to form, Google laid waste to those claims when it brought home $1.3bn (￡700m) profit between January and March 2008, from a turnover of $5.1bn (￡2.7bn).

Conclusion: Entrepreneurship is a journey, a journey that may not be smooth. Everything won’t go as planned but in all, do not give up. Prove that your dream, idea, and vision are valid. Google did, She has over 270 products now, You can do the same.