Acquired
Available on Spotify, Apple and more
An old argument for showing up at the office rather than working from home is the “synergy” you get from talking to your colleagues. I don’t know whether this works for everyone, but the chances of synergy are especially high if you’re lucky enough to sit next to The Times’s Danny Finkelstein on a Tuesday morning. This Tuesday, Danny mentioned that he had been listening to a podcast called Acquired. Had I come across it? I hadn’t. “Like The Rest Is History but for business,” he said.
A comparison with The Rest Is History is enough to persuade me to try anything.
And it turns out Danny is right. Of course he is. Acquired is brilliant. I can’t believe it hadn’t crossed my radar.
Over the course of long episodes — some clock in at more than four hours — the hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal tell the history of a company. The subjects include Rolex, Mars, Ikea, Starbucks, Hermès, Nike, Nvidia and Porsche. I’ve been absorbed by the recent instalment about Google. It’s compulsive listening: thoughtful, lucid, deeply researched and witty in a mild, unobtrusive way (far from the rule among American podcasters).
The Google story starts at Stanford in the Nineties. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are developing a new searchengine technology. Hilariously, they christen it Backrub. In the Nineties everything on the internet had a weird name; their early competitors were search engines called “Excite”, “Infoseek” and “HotBot”.
What a time to be alive.
Most search engines ranked results via a relatively crude system based on the number of relevant keywords on a given web page. So if there’s a company that has “a whole bunch of instances of ‘dog’ then that’s going to be at the top of your ranking” when you search for “dog”. This system is easily manipulated:
“If you wanted to rank highly for ‘dog food’ you just spam ‘dog food’ in invisible text all over your page.” Meanwhile, Yahoo (remember that?) was a “hand-curated guide or directory to the internet”.
Human editors collated lists of the best web pages on given topics. Amusingly, many people in the industry believed “search engines will never be able to replace human curation and human thought about what the most interesting sites on the web are”.
The Google revolution (or, more accurately but weirdly, “the Backrub revolution”) was to build a system that tracked the websites that had been most linked to, and ranked them higher accordingly. This turned out to be an excellent way of working out which websites people found most useful, and the resultant ranking has served as the “front door” of the internet ever since.
But in the Nineties, nobody had any idea how the internet was going to work. The thing was growing incredibly quickly.
Between “1993 and 1996 the web grew from 130 sites to more than 600,000”. Gilbert and Rosenthal point out that had the Google founders got started “just a year or even a couple of years later”, their task would have been “impossible”.
The web “would have got so big” that to start indexing it from scratch would have been “prohibitively expensive”.
Many failed to understand the genius of Page and Brin’s system. When the two men tried to sell Backrub to Excite (weird phrase), they were turned down. Backrub was too effective. Excite wanted to keep users on its homepage so they would spend more time looking at their banner ads.
How are you supposed to make money if your users keep finding exactly the page they need and disappearing? “D’oh!” as that other Nineties icon Homer Simpson would have remarked.
Inevitably, Page and Brin started their own company.
Investor cash flowed in. And the rest, as they say, is history.
If Acquired is not quite The Rest Is History, it’s still brilliant.
I highly recommend it. Thank you, Danny Finkelstein. How’s that for office synergy?
No comments:
Post a Comment