Google: From a Garage to Torrence Boone

The quintessential garage business to NASDAQ success story, Google Inc. has long since become the world’s leading search engine. The addition of Torrence Boone in 2010 as Managing Director of Agency Development for North America signaled just how far the company had come. Once essentially a place for self-service ads, Google now seeks relationships with major ad agencies and the billions of advertising dollars they control. Torrence Boone came to the search-engine leader with an impressive resume that included serving as CEO of Enfatico, Dell’s integrated marketing agency; and as President of direct-marketing and digital agency Digitas.

Established in that proverbial garage in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who met at Stanford University and developed a precurser, BackRub, before generating more than $1million in seed money, Google answered more than 10,000 queries daily almost from the start. By the following year, the number had risen to 500,000 searches, enabling the partners to relocate the company to larger headquarters in Mountain View, California. By 2000, Google had become the provider on Yahoo! of supplementary searches. Garnering more than 50 percent of all online searches, the company maintains a reputation for speed, relevance, and reliability.

Hiring Torrence Boone makes perfecct sense in Google’s growth strategy from a simple search engine to an intuitive machine with added products such as Chrome, gmail, Nexus 7, and Nexus Q. While the platform may not have appealed to large agencies in the past, by 2010, the year Google brought on Mr. Boone, the technology was handling 3 billion searches per day. Even assuming many people conduct multiple searches, that’s a boatload of potential customers for ad agencies and their clients. And based on its record, Google should continue to expand its product portfolio, making future ad purchases even more inviting.