"When running on the Stanford network their searches were thousands, sometimes millions, of times faster than the conventional technology", writes Tom Perkins, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers in his book Valley Boy, "in fact it was so popular that the Stanford network became overloaded with the Google traffic."
Bechtolsheim was interested. "I used the Internet at the time primarily for searching", he told the author of The Google Story, David Vise, "and part of my frustration was that Alta Vista, which was the standard, was not very good."
He also like the fact that Brin and Page wanted money for one reason only: to buy motherboards to build more computers to expand the reach of their search engine.
But there was a stumbling block:
"The key question with any Internet start-up", said Bechtolsheim, "is how are you going to make money?
Brin and Page weren't interested in an advertising-based business model which was the obvious way ahead.
Nonetheless, Bechtosheim gave the pair a cheque for $100,000 without any discussion about stock holdings, or valuation, or the fact that Brin and Page had not, at that time, even incorporated a company.
The cheque, made out to 'Google Inc.' sat in Page's desk drawer for a couple of weeks until Google was incorporated and had a bank account.
One year on, and Google's computers were handling 500,000 searches a day. and Brin and Page realised they needed more computers, and that required more money and that meant venture capitalists
Who should they go to? They identified John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers and Mike Moritxz of Sequoia Capital.
Doerr ansd Moritz both wanted to invest, but each wanted the lead role. They squabbled, but eventually a compromise was reached in which KP and Sequoia each invested $12.5 million, while agreeing that Brin and Page retained a majority of the shares.
"Together with our friends (and sometimes competitors) at Sequoia, $20 million was invested for about 24 per cent of the company", writes Tom Perkins, "we took half of that investment. To date it's our most successful home-run."
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