It had been a while since Jaesung last visited Stanford, and he headed straight to the building where the Yahoo lab used to be.
Every time he came here, memories surfaced of coding the Yahoo portal site algorithms together with Jeremy Yang and Dave Filo in that lab.
“It’s been quite some time since they quit school and started the company.”
With the recent IPO, Yahoo—which was already the most famous site on the internet—was now becoming known even to the general public.
As the internet began to be fully utilized, the company was growing differently day by day, and its scale was expanding rapidly.
“Jeremy and Dave’s old lab is already being used by other students?”
Out of habit, Jaesung looked for the office and, just in case, tried opening the door with the key he had. He’d visited so often during the Yahoo days that Dave had made a copy for him.
“Huh? Who are you? The door was locked—how did you get in?”
“Sorry. I was close with the people who used this place before, so I have a spare key.”
Inside the room, two young men who looked Jewish were typing on keyboards.
“If you’re talking about the previous occupants, that would be Yahoo founders Jeremy Yang and Dave Filo—did you know them?”
“Yes. I love programming, so I helped develop Yahoo here with them.”
They didn’t doubt that a young Jaesung had co-created Yahoo and nodded, saying it made sense.
“Both my parents are computer science professors, so I programmed from a young age too. Do your parents work in computers?”
“No. My dad is a medical school professor. I learned computers on my own because I like them.”
Seeing Jaesung’s confidence in his skills, one of the men took interest and shared his own story.
“I’m researching a search engine for my PhD thesis that produces better results than existing ones.”
“Yahoo and most search engines rank web pages based on how many times a specific keyword appears on the page.”
“Oh! You know it well.”
The man had hypothesized that analyzing relationships between websites, rather than the existing method, would yield better results.
“I named this project BackRub. I started it alone in January this year and brought this friend on as a colleague.”
“So you’re saying the page with the most links from other relevant web pages is the most relevant to the search?”
“Wow! That’s impressive! You grasped the core without me fully explaining.”
As the ordinary-looking man explained his project, Jaesung concentrated on maintaining a neutral expression.
No way I’d meet these two here. But wasn’t this project supposed to start next year?
While Jaesung racked his memory, the man asked.
“What do you think? Does the concept seem good to you?”
“If the algorithm is well-written, it should show excellent results, but it’ll require strong server hardware performance for the computations, right?”
“That’s true, but we’re still in the hypothesis stage, so we haven’t decided to actually build a search engine yet.”
The project based on this hypothesis would first be used only within Stanford University, then officially register a domain and launch in 1997.
Come to think of it, it starts use at Stanford in spring semester ’97, so starting around now makes sense.
Excited that Jaesung understood the hypothesis he was pondering, the man explained quite detailed algorithms before pausing.
“Oops. I haven’t even asked your name. I’m Larry Page. This friend here is Sergey Brin.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m James Yoo. I’m Korean, from Seattle.”
The two Jaesung met were the founders of Google—the company that would operate search-engine-based portals and various platforms, create the Android OS, and become one of the world’s largest internet and AI companies, with advertising and cloud as main revenue models.
Starting as a school search engine, Google would surpass Yahoo and take the No. 1 usage spot in most countries from the early 2000s.
They register the domain next September, then found Google Inc. exactly a year later in September ’98. I planned to visit next year for early investment—looks like it worked out well.
Like with Yahoo, Jaesung intended to visit Larry Page and Sergey Brin often as they built Google, help a bit with research, and invest for equity.
Yahoo and Netscape would increase his assets before fading into history, but Google would grow into an online superpower, so maintaining some influence was necessary.
And by the time Google truly grew, Jaesung would be an adult, so he needed to put more effort here.
“You’re not living in San Francisco. My dad often comes to Stanford for conferences, so I can tag along then. Is it okay if I visit again?”
“You already have a lab key—we couldn’t stop you anyway.”
“If a Yahoo helper assists us, we’d be grateful.”
Google’s earliest investment would come in late August 1998, right before fall semester—from Stanford professor David Cheriton and, through his introduction, Andy Bechtolsheim, $100,000 each—to expand servers and secure a larger index than they had.
Half a year later, they’d get larger funding from the venture capital industry’s two leading firms, and in July ’99, an additional $25 million.
It was too much for Jaesung alone to swallow whole, but he planned to cover more than half the investment.
Google builds steadily and only goes public in 2004.
Despite free service, Google perfected its revenue model and IPO’d in 2004 at $42.50 per share, closing that day at $597.11—a 1,304% single-day gain rarely seen even in Bitcoin.
After learning from Warren Buffett over vacation, money thoughts keep coming up. Well, I’ve tasted money lately with companies going public.
Snapping out of thinking only about IPOs and shares, Jaesung prepared for a deep conversation with the two about search engine algorithms.
“Jaesung. So you were here.”
Just as he resolved to be helpful, his dad arrived after the conference and witnessed him talking with unfamiliar grad students.
“Oh no. Couldn’t wait and doing this again?”
“No. I coincidentally met Larry and Sergey today.”
Having been through this before, dad assumed the same situation and bowed apologetically to the two.
“My son is so addicted to investing in startups he can’t help it. If he offered money for equity, I apologize.”
“James didn’t mention money. He has deep understanding of search engines, so we were discussing algorithms—no need to worry.”
Larry Page cleared the misunderstanding, saying it was purely academic, but Sergey Brin’s eyes sparkled at the mention of money.
“I have to go now, so I’ll visit again next time.”
“Yeah. See you.”
On the way home from Stanford, dad asked what the people he’d met were making.
“They’re grad students like Jeremy, working on a search engine project.”
“So like a Yahoo site?”
“It’s a bit different precisely, but you can think of it as similar. Yahoo’s search is secondary—people manually discover sites and categorize them, so accuracy isn’t great.”
“You’re the one who early-invested in Yahoo, helped develop it, and just saw it IPO—not really in a position to say that.”
“Direction and management were entirely decided by the two of them—I just gave a little technical advice from the side.”
Sorry to Jeremy and Dave, but Jaesung planned to sell all Yahoo shares at the dot-com peak.
He could help a bit early on, but now that Yahoo was growing from mid-size to large corporation, there wasn’t much a middle schooler like him could do.
“Then, planning to invest this time too?”
“It’s still just a research project for a thesis—can’t invest even if I want to. At minimum, we’d need a mockup for beta testing to judge, and that’ll take at least half a year.”
“Good. I was startled thinking you’d invested again while I blinked.”
He told dad he wouldn’t invest, but that meant not now—not that he never would.
No matter how worried dad was, he couldn’t let the early Google investment opportunity slip away.
There’s still time, so I can proceed slowly. At least now I have a reason to come to San Francisco.
Pixar’s Steven Jobs was much busier after Toy Story’s success and flashy IPO, hard to meet, and Allen Musk was burdensome to see often—meeting him made you forget who the middle schooler was.
After leasing the electric cars recently, every meeting he’d make motor sounds with his mouth while “driving,” which was exhausting.
“Is the company called ‘NVIDIA’ okay? It seems to have the worst results among the ones you’ve invested in.”
“It’s not an internet service—it’s manufacturing, designing and selling GPUs directly, so it needs time.”
Having set the wrong design direction initially, wasting a year and astronomical budget, NVIDIA was struggling desperately to survive.
Dad looked curiously at his son answering professionally, thinking kids indeed absorbed new technology fast.
“And from now on, funds will be managed through the corporation, so you don’t have to worry too much.”
“Come to think of it, I looked up Warren Buffett—he’s incredibly famous.”
Dad hadn’t known who Warren Buffett was, nor heard of Berkshire Hathaway.
He thought Sam Walton had introduced someone suitable to manage Jaesung’s money, but personally checking, he found the man was not just famous—he’d recently become the world’s richest.
He worried a bit about unusual figures connecting around his son, but meeting them, none had personality issues.
“Tiger signed with Nike this time. He said he’ll join the PGA Tour soon.”
“I read the article too. Huge amount for a player not even pro debuted yet.”
Sensing dad was about to nag out of worry, Jaesung shifted to golf, allowing a comfortable ride home.
With little vacation left, he powered through homework, and when the semester started, Jaesung became a ninth-grader.
“Oppa! There’s a kid at school who wants to meet you.”
“If it’s a close friend who likes computers, invite them home.”
“It’s a boy, but he doesn’t seem to like computers.”