WHEN Omid Kordestani first met Larry Page and Sergey Brin, he was a successful business-development executive at Netscape Communications, the browser company that opened the world’s eyes to the power of the internet, and they were 25-year-old drop-outs from Stanford University – albeit with a promising search engine called Google.

At the time – early 1999 – Google employed only four or five engineers in a garage in Palo Alto, California, and had no clear idea about how it was going to make any money. Kordestani was introduced to them because he thought Netscape might be able to make some use of search.

It didn’t turn out quite as Kordestani expected. Sitting at a ping-pong table, he was soon embroiled in a six-hour interview, with the inexperienced Brin calling in his engineers to help in the cross-examination. At the end, Kordestani took them all out and bought them dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

“The sparkle in their eyes, this real idealistic view that they could change the world, was clear from day one,” said Kordestani last week.

“That simplicity was really what attracted me, that innovation was so clear. I was convinced that even if they decided to build furniture, it was going to be the most innovative furniture that you’d ever seen.”

So, two months before the birth of his second child, Kordestani took the “very risky and scary move” to become Google’s 12th employee.

As the world knows, it turned out pretty well – for Google and for Kordestani. The advertising business that Kordestani built is today worth nearly $150 billion (£76 billion), and his own fortune is estimated at $2 billion.

Google now employs more than 12,000 people, though it continues to take exhaustive care over new recruits. Page personally signs off on all new hirings every Wednesday.

Britain has been a big part of Google’s success, contributing 16%, or $578m, of total revenues in the first three months of this year. With strong growth in Germany, France and Spain as well, the company has just promoted Indian-born Nikesh Arora to the new role of president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

“Nikesh is doing a tremendous job,” said Kordestani, who, as senior vice-president for global sales and business development, is Arora’s boss.

From having only 400 staff when Arora joined in November 2004, Google Europe now has 2,000 employees, with engineering centres in London, Zurich, St Petersburg and Trondheim in Norway. Among its important European partners are the BBC and Axel Springer, the German publishing group.

Google had always seen itself as “a global phenomenon”, not just an American business, said Kordestani. He was given the job of globalising the newly profitable company when Eric Schmidt, a Silicon Valley veteran, took over as chief executive in mid2001.

“Eric told me to get on a plane and don’t come back until we have international revenues reflecting our international usage,” he recalled. When he arrived in Britain, Kordestani had to hold meetings in hotel lobbies. Google was already Britain’s most popular search engine, but it did not have any offices here.

Like Brin, Kordestani is an immigrant to America. He was born in Iran and grew up there, attending an Italian Catholic school in Tehran that emphasised education and language skills. As a boy, he spent a lot of time in London with his parents.

The death of his father prompted his family to move to California in 1978 when he was 14. By coincidence, this was only one year before the Iranian revolution “turned our whole world upside down”.

Along with Schmidt, Kordestani will be back in Britain again tomorrow to attend Zeitgeist, the company’s annual gathering to discuss technology trends with industry leaders. This year’s participants include WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, BSkyB’s James Murdoch, the BBC’s Mark Thompson and David Miliband, the environment secretary When Kordestani joined Google, the fledg-ling firm was still experimenting with ideas for generating revenue, including licensing its search engine to other websites and large companies. Contrary to the suggestion in The Search, John Battelle’s book on the company, Kordestani said Google’s founders were never opposed to advertising per se, only to intrusive banner ads that detracted from the all-important user experience.

“Our founders were very savvy,” he said. Despite the dotcom euphoria, Page and Brin were keenly aware that Google could not become successful without customers, and that revenue “is not a bad word”.

Kordestani said it was interesting that everything that Google tried had made money. “Our enterprise business has grown to be a very successful business by itself,” he said. Google Apps, as it is called, charges companies a fee for a suite of Google’s software, including e-mail, instant messaging, word-processing and spreadsheets. However, this business is dwarfed by the colossal success of search-based advertising, which generated the bulk of Google’s $10.6 billion of revenues last year.

The great advantage of key-word advertising is that advertisers can quickly see what works and what does not.

Kordestani said this was only the start, and the company planned to apply the same data-driven approach to other forms of advertising: television, print, radio and emerging formats such as on mobile phones.

“Our vision is very simple,” he said. “The effectiveness and accountability [of search] can extend to all these new areas. There’s not only a lot of spending in other segments, but there is a great desire among customers to have the same view into the performance of this advertising, and be able to understand how best to allocate budgets between the different formats.

“It’s about efficiency and accountability. The ultimate vision is [to create] a dashboard that helps chief marketing officers to have real visibility of how best to spend money and allocate their budgets. There’s a lot of power in that.”

Google’s broadening ambitions recently prompted it to spend $3 billion to acquire Double Click, a firm that acts as an intermediary between web publishers and online advertisers.

Last week, the growing potential of digital advertising prompted Microsoft to spend $6 billion on Aquantive, the owner of the leading agency Razorfish. WPP, one of the world’s biggest marketing groups, bought 24/7 Real Media of New York for $649m.

Every Monday, Kordestani reviews Google’s most important partnerships, with input from Schmidt, Page and Brin. The involvement of the founders is one indication of their determination to remain much more than figureheads.

The power balance within the triumvirate is a source of considerable fascination in Silicon Valley. It is widely assumed that Brin and Page, who are still large shareholders, ultimately call the shots, irrespective of Schmidt’s position as chief executive.

Kordestani said: “They have their own areas of passion where they spend their time. Eric and Larry spend a lot of time with our engineering teams, reviewing the priorities and doing rapid reviews of the products.

“Given the phenomenon and given how fast Google has grown and how ambitious our vision is, it’s great to have three great brains at the top of the company sharing that responsibility.”

GOOGLE NUMBERS

10100: A googol, the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros from which the trademark ‘Google’ was derived.

1998: The year that Stanford university students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company.

$23 billion: the valuation of the company when it was floated on the stock market in 2004.

8 billion: the number of web pages that Google searches in less than half a second.

$3 billion: Google’s annual profits (2006)

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