Larry Page founded Google on a sleep dream

Posted at June 30, 2009

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larry_page Here’s a tip for entrepreneurs (and everyone else): If you want great success, dream it. Literally.

Google co-founder Larry Page recently revealed in his commencement address to the University of Michigan that the basic platform for google was based on a sleep dream he had in college. Page, then 23, took the source material of his dream and worked it until it became a minor internet player.

Page told the college grads that he had a “vivid dream” at age 23 that woke him up in the middle of the night that he just had to write down.

Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my adviser, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

There is nothing inherently special about Larry Page that isn’t also in all of us. He just took the ball and ran like Forrest Gump with it.

examiner.com