24 September 2008
Which internet company did you cofound?
Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that a third individual, Hubert Chang, claims to have worked with Sergey and Larry on their PageRank PhD paper which eventually became the basis for the search engine Google.
In the video, Chang claims he was introduced to S&L back in 1997 and worked with them to come up with PageRank, the name Google and even the company business plan. However, he left S&L to commit himself to his own PhD and claims he had arranged to get back in touch with them after he had finished. It was his decision not to put his name on the PageRank paper.
Not very surprisingly, he claims all emails between himself, Sergey and Larry have been deleted. Apparently, he did try and contact them again in 2002 but was told to go away by someone acting on S&L’s behalf.
I doubt this is real - the guy in the video certainly doesn’t give me reason to believe him, only lots of excuses. What is odd is that the YouTube version of this video was uploaded in Dec 2007 and yet it has only come to light now.
So, in light of Chang’s antics. Which internet company did you help found?
Andrew (of Mixergy) claims he is the cofounder of TechCrunch. Another commenter at TechCrunch gives his version of those early days of Google:
Larry, Sergey and me were all IRC Junkies at the time. we were all hanging out in #fed on the dalnet network. Larry’s nickname at the time was ntwak0 and Sergey’s was NetSpyder (mine was ilan` (as in “Integrated Local Area Network, yeah I know it’s dumb..) anyway.. the original google PR algorithm was planned out in our channel.. I do remember this chinese guy and a guy named MonoXyde and Cripexi.. there were about 7 more visitors just idle’ing.. let’s see now.. I remember BioWin, Kaflik, and some more.. they all have their own network security companies now.. but I WAS THE SOURCE for the PR Plan! I invented it!
2 Comments currently posted.
Andrew of Mixergy says:
hqTran says:
My name is Hung Tran after reading this people may think that I am a clown.
Some may call me a liar. But it has to be said: I am the 2nd co-founder of mixergy.com.
My original idea was to create a site that organizes event around the tech community to people build better startups.
I must admit I was NOT really a believer in social networking sites. Early August I met a brilliant energetic young entrepreneur.
He was hard working and has his heart set in the right places so together we founded the idea of creating an online site to
act as a central repository for knowledge.
We wanted a place where entrepreneurial minded folks like us to can learn and also teach others.
We would interview them and put the interviews on the site.
That was the idea. At that time Andrew also had a long standing passion to go to clown school and tried to convince me to join. I also had school of my own: Traffic school.
I talked it over with my parents who thought it was important to finish traffic school on time. So i thought: clown school - not good for traffic school.
So I made what seemed like the right choice at that time and told Andrew no and that I would be dedicating myself to traffic school 100%.
So we agreed that whom ever gets out of their school first would start to build out the site and being organizing events. It took me some time before finally passing my exams.
I then twittered Andrew and to my surprise without warning I heard nothing back. I just want the truth to be out there.
After many years of silence, I’m ready to finally come forward and tell the world that I co-founded bloggle.org.uk