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Google, Inc. business check, 6 x 2.75, filled out and signed by Larry Page, "Lawrence Page," payable to "Kingstar" for $4561.66, no date but processed by the bank on April 16, 1999. Google's address is given as "165 University Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94301," otherwise known as the 'Lucky Building' or 'Karma Building.' In fine condition. Encapsulated and graded by PSA/DNA as "MINT 9."
Google, Inc. was officially incorporated on September 7, 1998, by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as a way to bring their 'PageRank' algorithm—an improved method of ranking internet search results, developed in the course of their Stanford doctoral work—to the masses. This check, dating to mere months later, is not only quite early in the company's history, but represents a major purchase as it began to scale—computers bought from one of its most important vendors.
King Star Computer, based in Santa Clara, would soon build Google's infamous 'corkboard' system—a modest (but effective) group of custom-built server racks which featured standard, off-the-shelf PC motherboards seated on raw corkboard for insulation. At the time the order was placed in the summer of 1999, the entirety of Google's search engine was running on just over a hundred servers. Google commissioned King Star Computer to build out a 21-rack setup of 20 shelves a piece, each shelf carrying four servers—for a grand total of 1,680. Google's eighth employee, network engineer Urs Hölzle, later reflected: 'At the time of the order, we had a grand total of 112 servers so 1680 was a huge step. But by the summer, these racks were running search for millions of users. In retrospect the design of the racks wasn’t optimized for reliability and serviceability, but given that we only had two weeks to design them, and not much money to spend, things worked out fine.'
Having received several million dollars in venture capital investments, Google, Inc. had just moved out of its Menlo Park garage (at the home of Susan Wojcicki) and into its first real office space in Palo Alto's 'Lucky Building'—famed as an incubator for several noted Silicon Valley startups. In addition to documenting a computing infrastructure investment as Google's search began to catch on, this check represents Google's early, rapid growth—the firm occupied the 'Lucky Building' for only a few months before needing to move to a larger space, a victim of its own success. Google began building custom billion-dollar data centers in 2006, and today spends upwards of $5B per quarter on its worldwide data center infrastructure.
The consignor notes: "King Star Computer Inc. would play a significant role in the creation and success for Google. They were the provider of the servers that powered the search results for the company for many years. I joined the company in April of 2002. I worked in the Finance department as the manager of Disbursements and Payroll. I was the first manager level hired in the Finance department. I came across these checks as we were moving from one location to another, as we did frequently. The checks were to be discarded to make room for other files. The company was growing very fast at the time. I kept them thinking it would be fun to have from a historical perspective."
