Fellow Classmates
Indeed
some of the best friends you make will be
those you meet in business school. One of
the most powerful brands and products to
have emerged in the past few years is the
popular search engine service Google. Google
was co-founded by Ph.D. students Larry Page
and Sergey Brin, two Stanford Doctorate
students that are now making sense of the
Web and sorting the
overwhelming information found on it better
than anyone else. This theme must have been
contagious in Palo Alto because Yahoo! was
created by two Stanford students as well.
David
Filo and Jerry Yang were two Ph.D. candidates
in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.
As the Web was starting to spiral out of
control, the two started a guide out of
their campus trailer in February 1994. Their
goal was simple but ambitious: to keep track
of their personal interests on the Net.
As the Web grew, so did their guide and
the time they spent on it – at the
expense of their Doctoral dissertations.
With time, the endless links morphed into
directories, and with it the seed of Yahoo!
was planted.
Originally
called "Jerry's Guide to the World
Wide Web," the site eventually took
on the name of Yahoo!, an acronym for "Yet
Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
The founders maintain that the name stuck
because of the connotation of something
"rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."
Whatever it was, in the fall of 1994, Yahoo!
was serving over 100 thousand unique visitors.
Like
Yahoo!, Google was a project that turned
into a business. Ironically, in 2001, the
industrious Google search engine began to
power the millions of daily searches on
Yahoo! A match made in heaven? Well, Stanford
anyway.
Projects
lead to teamwork and gamesmanship. But teamwork
and competition engenders opposition,
jealousy and envy.
It
will not take very long before you see why
business is a rat race. Before your first
term is over, any idealistic notion you
have of school being fair will go down the
drain. It is often in business school that
the seed of ambition, success and teamwork
is planted and nurtured. But it is also
at this juncture when envy, jealousy and
backstabbing infect you.
In
any student's development, a time comes
when that greed muscle starts pumping and
paranoia sets in. Intel co-founder Andy
Grove said it best in his book Only the
Paranoid Survive: if you want to get ahead,
you should learn to trust others but always
sleep with an eye open .
Some
will be happy to see you succeed. But envy
and jealousy are too innate in human beings
for most to be genuinely happy for you.
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