First published in The Age on October 27, 1998
The glut of cash flowing into Silicon Valley over the last few years may be corporatising the startup culture, but cool new technologies are still being spawned in student garages.
While many complain that the valley has been scarred by the stampede of venture capitalists and MBA students who have rushed to join the gold rush, two new startups are proving that some traditions can not been shaken.
A one-month old startup company founded and entirely staffed by Stanford PhD students has just received private investment to build the third Internet search engine to come out of Stanford University.
Google wants to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors, valley legends Yahoo and Excite, that were also born in a Stanford shed.
It has built a next generation search engine that sorts Web search results by the number of other "important" sites linking to each page.
Google's founders spent three years researching an algorithm named Page Rank (named after co-founder, Larry Page) based on the principle, according to Page, "that you are important if important pages point to you."
So a link from Yahoo would give a page a greater ranking that a link from an individual's web site.
Google can also incorporate certain text characteristics such as the appearance of words in bold text, or in header text, or in a large font size in the ranking equation.
The search engine is currently only a prototype (and can be found at google.stanford.edu) but Page said it would be launched "in the near future".
It now has more than 25 million indexed pages and hopes to raise that to about 100 million.
There are more than 300 million publicly indexable pages on the Web.
Google is trying to keep a low profile and will not reveal its angel investors,or amount of seed funding, but it was enough to attract the students away from their studies.
"People in the valley leave (their university studies) because of tremendous opportunities. They don't usually go back."
The Google founders are not the only students turning their backs on their books.
Just before school went back in September, three University of Virginia students moved their Internet startup out of their basement headquarters to a spanking new office, with a first round venture funding.
The students started Raging Bull, a Web site that hosts stock discussions, as a hobby and soon found it becoming a little more than a part time occupation.
Since June, when university broke for summer holidays and the founders were able to give the site their full attention, traffic to the site has ramped up from 100 to 15,000 unique visitors a day.
Raging Bull is now the fourth largest financial message board site, behind Yahoo Finance, the Motley Fool and Silicon Investor.
Co-founder William Martin said the startup was pleased to have some help from venture capitalist backers CMG Information Services as well as some "adult supervision".
"We have to hire people and set up business systems," Martin said.
"As a 20yearold, I have no insight into these kinds of things."
Martin said he was inspired to start the company because he noticed a niche in the message board market - no one else was providing the ability for users to filter out posts on certain topics and from certain users.
The startup has developed an `ignore button' which offers that function.
Like the Google founders, the students are leaving their studies to become Internet entrepreneurs and, in true Silicon Valley tradition, hope to make their millions before turning 25.
First published in The Age on October 27, 1998
