Days in the Life of Mo

Let’s imagine it’s 1996. You’re in your dorm room at Stanford, running code obsessively, eating instant noodles at 3 AM, and there’s rumors you just crashed the campus network. This wasn’t some hacker….

You were probably Larry Page or Sergey Brin. That was BackRub time.

BackRub: The OG Google

BackRub was the name of Larry and Sergey’s search engine PhD project at Stanford. It ranked web pages not by keywords, but by back links, like academic citations, but for websites. PageRank was born.

They used spare PCs, scavenged Stanford’s loading dock for gear, and crankily built a crawler that mapped link relationships.

Fun fact: it once ate half of Stanford’s bandwidth. Dorms became makeshift servers. Pass the ramen.

From BackRub to Google

By 1997, “BackRub” felt… unpolished. During a brainstorming sesh, one of their roommates, Sean Anderson, suggested “googolplex.” Larry shortened it to Google (via a typo registering google.com, not googol.com)

The goal? Organize info as big as a googol zeroes.

In 1998, armed with a $100K check from Andy Bechtolsheim, they moved into a garage owned by, and rented from, Susan Wojcicki, future YouTube CEO.

Why BackRub Still Matters

1. Out of funding, they crafted a lean, scalable system on scraps. Sound familiar?
2. PageRank was a genius play, not just “what’s popular,” but who endorses you matters.
3. They stayed in school. They only launched Google after deciding grad school wasn’t the end game.

It’s a legend in dev circles; founders coding through nights until they accidentally created a global phenomenon.

What It Teaches Us

• Big ideas can start in dorms.
• Relevance is relational
• Be bold enough to change a project’s name

But above all? Keep tinkering, even when breaks feel impossible and scripts won’t run.

---

Did your big idea start as a lab project, side hustle, or midnight hack? Share your origin story below; I want to hear your “BackRub” moment

---

If this made your tech-loving heart beat faster, let’s stay connected. Get free nerdy-fun tech stories from me, a local dev girl who always has a constant eye on midnight code sessions. Subscribe below!