Thanks to a mutual friend, we rented our garage to two graduate students at Stanford
经朋友介绍 我们将车库租给了两个斯坦福研究生
who had just started a company, who were looking for office space
他们刚开了一家公司 正在寻找办公场所
They seem nice
他们看起来很棒
There ideas sounded kind of crazy
他们的想法听起来有些疯狂
Back then
当时
no one had heard of Larry Page and Sergey Brin
没人听说过拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林
or the new company with the funny name
或是他们开的那家名字滑稽的公司
Google?
谷歌？
What?
什么
What does that mean?
这是什么意思
It doesn't really matter
这没关系
As long as you guys pay the rent on time, you guys can build your Google anything here
只要你们能够按时交房租 管你们是谷歌还是别的什么
Wednesday moved in, we have late night
一个周三的深夜
together in the garage, eating pizza and M&M's
我们一起坐在车库吃批萨和M&M
when they talked to me about how their technology could change the world
他们跟我讲 说自己的技术能够改变世界
But then they would go on equally excited
之后他们同样兴奋地告诉我
about the fact that my house had a washer and dryer
说我家有洗衣机和烘干机真是太好了
They made bold proclamations
他俩很大胆地宣布说
We are going to organize the entire World Wide Web
我们将把全球网络组织到一起
followed by -- which day is recycling day?
说完之后 他们问我 垃圾回收日是哪一天来着
And when I asked them how much experience they had to back their ambitious plan
我问他们 你们有多少经验来支持这一雄心壮志
they would say well our combined age is almost 50
他们说 我们的年龄合起来可有将近50岁
and they were entering a competitive area
他们进入是一个竞争性极强的领域
There were many well-funded search engines
当时有很多资金充裕的搜索引擎公司
famous at the time, although you probably never heard of them
当时这些公司都很有名 只是你们可能没听说过
AltaVista, Lycos, Excite
比如AltaVista Lycos Excite
Can you imagine if you wanted to search for something online
想象一下 要搜索东西的时候你要说
and you had to say I'm going to AltaVista?
我要去AltaVista一下 这会是什么感觉
The answer, that would be kinda awkward
肯定会显得非常笨拙
