Why you have to have a plan, even if it doesn’t get you where you want to go.
Plans have the purpose of pointing us in a direction, but they don’t show us every pothole on the way.
Sergej Brin and Larry Page had one big goal when they founded Google: to collect the knowledge of the world and to relate it to each other.
What they definitely didn’t have was a perfect plan that included the advertising business, Gmail, Google docs, Streetview, and finally Google X.
Looking back today on the development of perhaps the most influential company in the world, we think that there must have been a prominent and smart plan that culminated in what we now know as Alphabet inc.
But the master plan did not exist. All Page and Brin had was the vision of collecting knowledge, systematizing it, and making it accessible to all people.
Their first real plan was to start with the information available on the Internet. Unlike many think, the search engine was never the declared ultimate goal of the two founders, but only a first step towards their grand vision.
And even this first plan — let’s build a search engine for the Internet — did not contain all the intermediate steps necessary to its realization.
