Google is now one of the biggest companies that organizes the world’s information, but had things done a little differently, it could have been a pizza delivery company.
In a reflection on his entrepreneurial ventures that preceded Google, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed a forgotten chapter from his pre-Google days: an ill-fated attempt to revolutionize pizza ordering through fax machines. Speaking about the mid-1990s era when the web was still in its infancy, Brin offered a glimpse into the experimental mindset that characterized Silicon Valley before search engines dominated the internet. His story serves as a reminder that even the most successful tech founders stumbled through failed projects before finding their breakthrough idea.
Brin recalled that he and Larry Page “worked on the ideas behind Google for a number of years, starting probably in ’95,” giving credit to Page for “really focusing on the link structure of the web.” But at the time, the web was new territory, and the barrier to entry was remarkably low. “It was so easy to create some new idea,” Brin explained.
His first moneymaking venture emerged from what seemed like a radical concept at the time. “I think my first moneymaking idea was this pizza ordering,” Brin said. “It seemed crazy at the time that you could order food online. Nowadays we take it for granted.” In a move that now seems prophetic, he even “put a Coke ad at the top” as a joke, thinking “it was so funny there’d be internet ads.” That humor didn’t age well. “Obviously, it turned out to be not that funny,” he admitted, given that internet advertising would later become the foundation of Google’s empire.
The pizza ordering service failed spectacularly, though the reason why offers a window into the technological disconnect of the era. “The way it worked is you’d put in your order to the website and then, pizza places were not online, generally speaking, but I had this idea they had fax machines so it would automatically send them a fax with the order,” Brin explained. The fatal flaw? “I realized they don’t actually check their faxes very often and it flopped from there.”
Despite the failure, Brin’s experimentation was typical of the period. “At the time, I guess all of us, probably in the computer science department, understood how the internet worked pretty well. How web servers worked. You could whip one of these out really quickly,” he said. “So everybody was just throwing stuff on the internet.”
Brin’s failed pizza venture highlights a recurring theme in tech innovation: being early isn’t the same as being right. While his idea anticipated the massive food delivery industry that would emerge decades later, the infrastructure simply wasn’t ready. Restaurants weren’t digitally connected, consumers weren’t comfortable with online transactions, and the bridge technology he chose—fax machines—proved unreliable.
Today, the online food delivery market is valued at over $150 billion globally, with companies like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub dominating the landscape. But Brin’s pivot from pizza delivery to organizing the world’s information proved fortuitous—search was a problem the internet of the late 1990s was ready to solve. He and Larry Page built something the nascent web desperately needed: a way to find things in the growing chaos of information. The fax machine pizza service may have flopped, but the experimental spirit behind it—rapidly prototyping ideas, thinking about how to bridge online and offline worlds, and even monetizing through advertising—would all become hallmarks of Google’s approach to innovation.