From the horse’s mouth: How Google Chrome was invented by tricking ex-CEO

Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma tweeted a video on Sunday wherein Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt revealed how Chrome was developed.

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Eric Emerson Schmidt, former CEO of Google, disclosed how Google’s web browser Chrome came into while addressing students at Stanford University in 2015.

In one minute-long clip, Schmidt revealed that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the CEO and President of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would sneak up on him and trick him, and one of those tricks led to the invention of Google Chrome.

Schmidt stated in the clip that Larry Page and Sergey Brin would often approach him and share their aspirations of developing an operating system and browser.

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“And I said there was no scenario we were going to do an operating system and a browser because Microsoft would kill us and I don’t want to get killed,” Schmidt explained.

Larry, Sergey and their whole team were extremely bright professionals, according to the Google former CEO. Schmidt feared that although they had the funds, Microsoft could “kill” them. 

As the audience laughed, he said, “So, they hired somebody to improve the performance of Firefox. Six months later, I am called down to one office, and this person, who was hired to improve the performance of Firefox has managed to invent Chrome.”

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The former Google CEO revealed he wasn’t shocked and when he asked the person how long they had been working on it, they said it was something they were doing on the side. “No, you have done it full-time,” he said.

He jokingly said that the person had 10 people under them and when they were if Page and Brin knew what was happening. “Larry and Sergey encouraged it,” was the answer.

“I knew they were going around me,” Schmidt said.

As a result, Chrome, the most famous browser, was developed, eclipsing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox in prominence.

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Larry Page and Sergey Brin met while pursuing their PhDs in computer science at Stanford University. Google was founded by the two in 1998. Together, Larry and Sergey developed Google’s PageRank algorithm. They formed Alphabet in 2015, which incorporated Google, Nest, Calico, and other companies.