Google: a company born of rejection
In reality, Google co-founder Larry Page just wanted to finish his doctorate, said Luis Mejia, a senior associate in the Office of Technology Licensing at Stanford University.
Mejia, who was working behind the desk one day in the mid-1990s when Page came in, said Page wanted Mejia's office to license the PageRank invention and get some royalties while he went back to his academic work.
(Credit:
Stanford University)
Unfortunately, licensing proved difficult. Only one search engine company made an offer, and it was more of a token offer. "They (Page and fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin) got frustrated so they decided to start a company," he said during a presentation Monday at the California Clean Tech Open. (Mejia was there to plug energy concepts at Stanford--like artificial photosynthesis--but he couldn't resist.)
The technology licensing office agreed to license the patents back to the pair--technically, the university owns professor and student research, but it willingly licenses it back to the originators. Still, it was an unusual deal. The two didn't have a business plan or money, so the university decided to take an equity stake in the company.
Stanford eventually sold its shares for $336 million, said Mejia. The Google work and patents on recombinant DNA have brought the university over $500 million. The office overall has earned the university over $1 billion in the past few decades.
So it's another happy ending story, thanks to patents.
I wonder, just a tad, if the success could have come with using licensing without patents, say, like most licensing is done today?
Again, CNET, thanks! Top-Notch reporting!