Being a startup company ourselves, Orchid Box understand our clients’ needs when they have to work within tight and constrained budgets and timings. And every company has to start somewhere, which, in the case of the web, more often than not means a bedroom or dark and dingy cupboard somewhere. So where did some of the biggest web companies today actually begin? Well, let’s have a look:
, almighty creator of the “empire”, is much publicised as starting off his groundbreaking website in his Harvard dorm. Some might find more fun things to do in their university dorm rooms, but they aren’t sitting on an world famous website now valued at around $15 billion dollars. Touche.
No. 2 if only so they aren’t number one at everything, Google are world beaters. But even they didn’t bubble out from the ether in a fully formed global-dominating state. Creators Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually started off in a garage, initially under the name “Backrub” with the pipe-dream of organising search results by more than just keywords. They’ve come on a bit since then…
Only called Digg because the dig.com domain was bought up by Disney years before, Kevin Rose set up his Digg in his Digs. That is to say his apartment. Now it is a social media website with tens of millions of users throughout the globe. It’s all about bumping, or “Digging” the best stories to the top of the page. Great for SEOs!
Slightly less exciting a start, though it’s a close call which is more exciting – a garage or an office – YouTube originated from Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen’s musing at a dinner party in early 2005. Within months they were hosting millions of videos on the YouTube servers. Google bought it for $1.65bn three years ago, and it now unbelievably makes them no money at all. In fact it costs them money to run. If they need someone to take up the reins, I guess I will…
We can all hope can’t we?
