As the cofounder, Larry could have assigned a team of engineers to the problem and given them a nice budget. Instead he got a digital camera, rigged it to a tripod, and set the contraption up on a table in his office. He pointed the camera down at the table, turned on a metronome to pace his movements, and started snapping pictures while Marissa Mayer turned the pages. Based on this crude prototype, they were able to estimate what it took to digitize a book, and made some calculations that the audacious project was indeed feasible. Google Books was born. (Sergey later employed a similar
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