The Beginning of Big Tech Companies

In this episode of The Vergecast, “Land of the Giants” hosted by Sri Kishan and Alex Kantrowitz creators from The Vergecast explore the five big tech companies and their impact on our world. The episode tells the story of how two grad school students with a unique way to search the internet launched a company that would become the gateway to the internet for the entire world.

The duo start the conversation by talking about the journey of Marissa Meyer in the world of big tech companies, a businesswoman and investor now, who was sitting in the most important interview of her life. It was at a startup called Google back then. The meeting was at their conference table in the main conference room, which used to be a university and also happened to be a ping-pong table. They chuckle and add that Marissa would go on to become one of the most prominent executives in Silicon Valley From 2012 to 2017.

She was CEO of Yahoo back in the late 90s where she was still a student at Stanford about to graduate with a master’s in computer science. While in the interview Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin was not going easy on her and asked her about a lot of different computer science topics.

The duo then discuss how empowered by a Google Cloud server, our lives are organized around the Google products while we don’t control how they work. Every decision Google makes, every tweak to its secretive algorithm, every little change to how it uses our personal data, every internal debate over company culture. All of that impacts billions of people. Google is so important that if a website doesn’t show up in the first few pages of a Google search, then it’s almost like it doesn’t even exist and the world must have sensed all this massive potential.

The duo talk about other funny tech stories and what might be the future of big tech companies, how google is way different than what it used to be and how other big tech companies are shaping up in the current geo-political scenario.