Pick a number, any number. Did you pick a number larger than a million? If you didn't, why didn't you?

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google while still graduate students at Stanford University. According to Fortune Small Business magazine, Internet users perform over 150 million searches a day on the Google search engine. The Google search engine can access over 2 billion pages in 74 different languages. One study recently showed that Google users used the search engine 13 million hours in one month. Compare that with Yahoo, which came in second with 5.4 million hours.

How did they get so big? I don't have the expertise to answer that question, but I can tell you that it began with their initial vision. The word googol is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. While most people are likely to pick a number like 14 or 98, Brin and Page decided to pick a googol—1 with 100 zeroes.

Jim Reese, chief operations engineer of Google, says this about the company's founders: "It takes a lot of confidence and courage to go ahead and do that [be huge]. It's rare to find people who think on such a grand scale and are able to create a great product at the same time."